Steel Nightmare
by Byronofsidius
Summary: After a short period of peace after the final Sigma Campaign, Megaman X and the Hunters' Organization face a new and far more subtle threat from unknown mechinoids. With Zero off-planet overseeing the construction of a moon-based facility, X must investigate the far-ranging and seemingly random attacks against humans by the mysterious bot known as Hephaestus.


Disclaimer

The following is a work of fiction. It is based upon the Megaman and Megaman X video game franchises owned and copyrighted by Capcom. The author of this original work owns no rights to Capcom's source material.

Author's Note: For the purposes of , where this story will first be presented, let it be known that this story is rated Mature, for language and violence. This is an AU (Alternate Universe) telling, as it strays from the traditional canon of the Megaman storylines. Do not expect canon in this telling.

For fans of Megaman yearning for a darker, nastier story, of which I believe the property not only capable but deserving in an industry which has finally embraced new and grittier tales for old favorites (the video game industry) I hope this finds you well.

Prologue

There had been darkness, nothingness, for a time unknown. It could have been minutes, hours, or years, he didn't know. What he did know was that he was coming back toward consciousness

The darkness behind his eyes seemed less dense, for one. Secondly, a faint pain throbbed in his arms and legs. The green text flashing before his mind's eye told him that his battery reserves were at 34%, though his life force meter read .00015%. He should be dead, by all accounts. Yet death only truly came at absolute zero percent. Then, or if the life spark unit were detached from the main battery and auxilliary for more than an hour.

The mechanoid made a mental effort, the equivalent of a grunting tug, and brought up a diagnostic of his body. Left arm, blown off. Right leg destroyed from the knee joint on down. Main torso unit, mangled. Head unit, cracked in various places. Left optic shattered, balance off 14% in right optic. Audio receptors intact.

This would be fine and dandy to know if he had a way of detaching himself from the pain. But even he felt the roaring fires of agony stoking as he came back around.

Robot Masters knew all manner of pain.

His right optic flickered to life, the chamber around him tilting madly into a hazy focus. The throne room he lay in appeared to be full of rubble, layered in dust and decay. How long had he been down? Why was he now coming back to activation?

Then he saw it, a small floating spheroid, hovering toward him. The gate monitor, he thought. It opened, and must have brought me back around. The metallic ball hovered closer, and now he could make out several tentacle-like appendages snaking off of it.

Stamped in the middle of the plate facing him was a snake wrapped around a needle. A medical bot, he thought. Looks fancy. The hovering bot drew within a few yards of him, and then a small panel slid to one side, a thin blue arc of light spilling out from it. The mechanoid looked to the left slightly to find a flickering blue hologram of another mechanoid standing in midair.

The holographic newcomer was of a sort the damaged Robot Master had never seen. Enormously armored, the other bot had the appearance of a shining medieval crusader. His shoulder plates were heavy and rounded, and his overall stance and affect was somehow regal.

The hologram displayed full color, though, after a flicker. White and red stylized armor, and a narrow optics slit in the head unit. The Robot Master was reminded a little of himself, though this newcomer had a somewhat sleeker overall look. The stranger also looked more menacing.

"Can you hear me," a low, gravelly voice said from the medic bot's speaker, the words in time with the faint rise and fall of a bulbous face covering on the stranger's faceplate.

The damaged Robot Master managed a weak "Yes," in reply, barely audible.

"Good. The medic bot is going to soon be joined by an enclosed transport vessel. It is going to put you inside, so that you can be brought to me. It will maintain your condition, and attempt to alleviate your pains. How are you feeling right now?"

The stranger sounded genuinely intrigued, though his massive arms were folded over his chest. His narrow, slitted eyes stared like a knife into the Robot Master's optic, which chose that moment to flicker, causing the world to appear to flash in and out of existence.

"I, hurt," the damaged mechanoid responded.

"I see. Harvey, lock down his tactile nodes, make him comfortable." One of the segmented steel arms on the medical bot reached out, and even as the damaged Robot Master watched, dumbfounded, it opened a sliding plate on his chest armor and tapped in a sequence that should only have been known to Dr. Wily.

It had been one of many failsafes the sneering old human had implemented when constructing the Robot Masters. They could not shut down their own pain, and Wily himself kept a device on hand to cripple them with a wave of agony if any of them became rebellious.

But they all needed occasional maintenance. Hence, the tactile node and external diagnostic board installed in each Robot Master. He could easily work on them without causing discomfort.

As the medical bot shut down his artificial nerves, the damaged Robot Master went slack. Another failsafe; should anyone deactivate their tactile nodes, the Robot Master would be paralyzed, only able to see, hear and speak.

He felt nothing, though. The stranger spoke up again. "Better?"

"Much. I have very little life force left, and my main battery is now operating at 28%. It has fallen 6 points since awakening."

"Not to worry. The transport is now between the control gates. It will be to you soon. I will speak with you again when you arrive at my facility. And don't worry; Harvey will hook your battery and life force units to chargers inside the transport."

The Robot Master's view changed as his body, what remained of it anyway, was lifted by some kind of grappler and eased into a well-lit mobile maintenance vehicle. The stark white interior smelled of oils and electricity, the muffled burn of ozone.

The medical bot floated into view on his right, and began running cords into various ports on the Robot Master's body. "What is your name," he asked of the stranger, whose holographic display had shrunk and rested now on his open chest plate.

"You may call me Hephaestus," the strange bot replied. "And I already know who you are, Knight Man. We are well met, and about to be even more so." With that, the hologram winked out, and Knight Man began to fade into the darkness of unconsciousness.

His time of disrepair was over.

Chapter 1

X

A whirling thrum of energy filled the air, and in the middle of the domed chamber, a winged, metallic monkey gibbered and raged, throwing electricity-wrapped spears one after another. The source of the humming, seeing the attack coming, snap-rolled left and then right, deftly evading both projectiles in a swirl of powder blue metal.

He stood upright, aimed the open cannon at the end of his left arm, and released the glowing blue-and-yellow vortex of whirring energy held at the ready. The beam erupted forth, a massive blue-yellow ball of energy that looked like a dragon's fireball of destruction.

It sped forth too fast for the monkey-bot to evade. With a spray of parts and crackle of discharged energy, the monkey-bot was destroyed. The energy shot flew the rest of the length of the empty arena, dissipating as it struck the absorbing panels against the opposite wall.

X heaved a sigh. He'd started this training drill with an arena filled with fifty of the mindless monkey-bots. In less than two minutes, all were destroyed. He should have felt satisfied. Instead, he felt weary, and bored.

There had been no Maverick activity for two years. No sign of Sigma, either. He wondered if perhaps he and Zero really had defeated him once and for all then. Not that Mavericks were the only thing for the Hunter Organization to take care of, but they posed the only real challenge. The conflicts of the humans really never amounted to much.

X turned and started stalking towards the exit, bearing himself upright and grinning, so that the few fellow reploids watching his training session wouldn't know what he was thinking. Keep on a happy face, he thought, and plow through the bullshit. Then, sign out and go home, where you can be free to be resigned, X. Only then.

Not that there was much for him at home, either. Home for X, and many reploids like him, was a spartan efficiency apartment, complete with charging station, repair unit and entertainment module. He wanted for nothing; as a Hunter, his room and board was paid for by the organization.

The automatic doors whooshed open as soon as a thin orange light flashed into X's optics from a panel over the door. His optics, also like most reploids, were round and soft in appearance, lending to the humanoid façade and shape of most of his kind. It was hard to imagine that the orbs that let him see were actually hardened plasteel synthetics, wired with all manner of systems throughout his frame.

Smiling faces greeted him as he entered the Staging Room. The training arena's controls and readouts lined the walls in consoles ringing the chamber, each one manned by a standard engineering reploid. Only one human sat in a swivel chair at the right side of the room, and it was this man that X walked over to after thanking the others for their cheerful commentary.

The human sat looking up at X with half-lidded eyes, his narrow, rat-like face betraying little emotion. A cigarrette dangled from the corner of his mouth. "Not bad, but it doesn't quite compare, does it?" X knew what the raspy-voiced man meant all too well.

"No, not quite, Dr. Veris. Come into my office with me." The pair left the Staging Room, walking through a series of white tile hallways and looping corridors, passing only a few other human and reploid personnel along their way. Maintenance bots and worker drones chirped and beeped at them amiably as they passed, though X and Veris offered only grins and nods in return.

A ride up fourteen floors in an elevator, and then they exited out into a narrow, plushly carpeted hallway. Various painting reproductions and organizational charts and graphs stood on the walls every half-dozen yards or so. When they finally came to a set of double doors marked simply 'X' on the left, the Blue Bomber punched in a key code on a panel next to the right door, and pushed his way into his office.

Flat, dull grey metal tiling on the floor, and across from them, his duty desk with its five monitoring and datastream consoles. Around the room on small pedastals, trophies from campaigns against the Maverick Master, Sigma.

"I see you haven't changed the layout," Veris commented, lighting a fresh cigarette.

"There's no need," X replied, maneuvering around behind his desk. He slid the central viewscreen aside so he could see the middle-aged human in the seat opposite. "Besides, I rarely come here these days. All of the reports are summarized and forwarded to my home console."

"Convenient. You really should try getting a nourishment unit and some taste bud implants. Makes life a little more enticing."

"Cut through the crap, Veris," X snarled, his synthskin brow furrowing. "You only come around when you've got something of interest to tell me. What's going on?"

The human offered a wry smile, tapped ashes on the tile floor. He took a long drag off of the cigarette and dropped it, chuffing out a stream of cerulean smoke. "Easy there, big guy. Just got some interesting data to share, that's all." X tapped the fingers of his left hand on the desk, itching to activate the switch to his Mega Buster Cannon.

He couldn't explain why, even to himself, but he often swayed between liking Veris and wanting to blow his head apart in a shower of brain and bone. The human reminded X of someone, though who, he didn't know.

"Is it something the Hunter HQ should know? Or is this just for me?"

"Just you, for now," Veris said evenly, the smile fading. He reached into one of lower lab coat pockets and produced a palm-sized datapad. "You should take a look at this."

X reached over the desk and took the datapad, looking intently at the screen. It appeared to be a field recovery report from somewhere in the United States, the state of Ohio. The coordinates meant nothing to him, but apparently, human authorities there had seen some kind of old-fashioned robot maintenance vehicle moving around an old restricted zone.

"I don't get what's so important about this," X said, setting the datapad down. "Old technology survives sometimes. Not my concern."

"Maybe not, but what would a robot maintenance vehicle from last century be doing in a restricted zone? And why is this area restricted in the first place?"

"Do you know anything more?"

"Not yet," Veris said with a sigh. "I get no answers from the Secured Data Department. Clearance issues. But there's something else. If you scroll through, you'll see there's been nearly twenty similar reports from different restricted zones over the last ten months."

X felt himself getting excited now. A mystery afoot, and one brought straight to him. He picked up the datapad again, scrolling through the reports. He looked up at Veris. "Mind if I download the reports?"

"By all means," Veris said. X tapped a panel on his right forearm, which sprang open to reveal a tiny keypad and cable. He pulled out the cable and hooked it into the datapad, downloading the most recently accessed files. While linked into the device, he noticed a file labeled 'Springer Project', and without letting on, he downloaded this file as well. Afterwards, he loaded a scrubbing program to erase any evidence that the 'Springer Project' file had been touched.

X unhooked the cable and slid the datapad back over to Veris. "I'll dig around in some of my personal archives at home, see if there's any significance in this. Thank you, Dr. Veris."

The human nodded and rose from his seat. As he was leaving, he paused by the door. "Any word on Zero?"

"Still on Moon Station 2," X replied. "He'll be there until the installation is complete. Four, maybe five more months."

"I see," Veris said. There was something approaching compassion in his voice. "Well, let me know if you find anything out." X nodded, and Veris left, letting the door ease shut behind him. X sat alone at his desk, thinking now about Zero, the crimson warrior who he called 'brother'.

He wondered, as he had since their last communique three weeks earlier, how Zero was doing up there on the moon.

For almost an hour after leaving Hunter HQ, X felt a certainty stealing over him with uncanny patience; the humans were afraid of him. Even though he'd walked this route to his building in Central City a dozen times or more in the last month, he hadn't noticed it before. The look in the eyes o the humans upon whom his gaze fell were glossy with trepidation, uncertainty.

Without Mavericks around for the Hunters to fight, how long until one of their own turned rogue? It had happened to Hunters before. With a precedent for the occurrence, surely the humans had to wonder about the reliability of even their most stalwart defenders.

Thus the greying of X's thoughts and attitude. He had been a truly righteous and noble hero, once. His predecessor, the first Megaman, never came against the vileness of worldly cynicism. No, the original Blue Bomber had been a hero to the bitter end.

That end had come with the transfer of his consciousness to the Light Complex, a scientific research station on the west side of Central City. Megaman the First still existed, though now as an artificial intelligence program linked into all the world's computer networks.

X wondered what that Megaman thought of the world that had come to be, now. He had never visited the Light Complex himself, never spoken with the persona upon whom he had himself been structured and built. He resolved to do just that at some point, and soon.

But first, this mystery brought to him by Veris. X turned left and entered the lobby of his building, eyes sweeping ahead. Nobody manned the desk standing between the elevators and stairwell access doors, but this was not out of the ordinary. Likely the fellow had nipped off on a service call.

X walked over to the left elevator and summoned it with a press of a button, and sniffed. In that single, involuntary action, often done without thinking by reploids, since they never actually had to breath but did so out of habit, his previous apprehension came flooding back.

Something smelled terrible in the lobby, something behind him. X turned around as the elevator dinged and slid open. He reached back and hit the 'hold' button, then slowly approached the lobby desk. The reek was coming from there.

As X stepped up to the side of the desk and looked down, he felt something he'd not experienced in a long time. When he thought back, he realized it had been sixteen years since that feeling had struck him, when he first faced off against the Maverick known as Vile.

The feeling was terrified disgust. Against Vile, that first encounter, he'd been appaled at himself, at his apparent lack of power. Here, his dismay came from the corpse lying behind the desk.

The human manning the desk had been stabbed and slashed along every major artery, from femoral to carotid. Blood pooled round him, and only now did X see the faint spatter of crimson on the lip of the desk. The stench of urine and faeces, spilled in horror or death, nearly overwhelmed him.

The smooth, curved cut along the throat had been powerful enough to cut halfway through the spinal column along the back of the poor man's neck. X tried to emotionally distance himself, activating his optic scanners and sweeping for evidence the authorities might overlook when they arrived. While scanning, he reached out with his hands to the communcation console on the desk and pressed the orange button to summon the police.

The button, had he looked, would have been seen to be quite dusty. After all, in a building where the legendary Megaman X resided, who would commit a crime?

X wanted to know just that.

Chapter 2

Brotherhood

When Knight Man next came to the bleary state of semi-consciousness he'd exerienced earlier, panic rammed him, a charging bull in foaming fury. Full wakefulness now, his sole battered optic trying deserately to find something familiar. Nothing.

He saw all around him an engineering laboratory, much like the one in which he'd been constructed in the first place. His spark had been installed early on; Dr. Wily had let Knight Man see most of his own body assembled.

Knight Man recalled thinking something had been very wrong with Dr. Wily in the last three or four days of his construction. It was as though the old man had begun to slowly unwind, only feigning interest when in truth there was no soul left in his work.

Knight Man had seen it, and had trembled. He felt certain now that the lack of attention on his creator's part had contributed to his eventual defeat at the hands of Megaman.

An error made in a lab much like this one, he thought. His battered optic roved, but otherwise Knight Man couldn't change his perspective. His head turned to one side, he could only hope he wasn't alone.

He made to speak, and heard his own voice coming not from his helmeted head unit, but rather, from a speaker somewhere behind him. "Hello?" No response, at first, and then a nearby whoosh of a pneumatic door opening. "Hello?"

"Ah, you're coming round," said the gravelly voice of the man calling himself Hephaestus. "That's excellent, truly! Don't try to move or access your diagnostics; you're in the process of being transferred to a new body."

"What," Knight Man said, and now his voice sounded like it was coming from about the right place. There was stutter in his vision, and suddenly, he found himself looking down at Hephaestus, who stood at a massive control console, looking up at Knight Man.

"You are presently loaded mostly into my Spark Transference Unit, a computer system I designed in order to allow for the transfer of all hard disk data and the spark itself to a new frame," Hephaestus said. He reminded Knight Man of someone, another Robot Master, but one that came before his time. But this thought was shunted roughly aside as the notion of what Hephaestus was suggesting sunk in

"What you are describing should be impossible," Knight Man said. He tried to turn his view, but once again found he could not. "Why can't I see what I want to?"

"Your optics are currently slaved to the cameras above the monitor of this workstation," the crimson and white mechanoid replied evenly. "I apologize for the disorientation. In a few minutes, your perspective will change again. There will be a minute or so of pain. I cannot change that, and for that, my friend, I am most sorry."

Knight Man pondered this for a moment. He realized now that his head was but an image displayed on a monitor screen. His spark, his very essence, was still in the wrecked heap that was his original body. He wondered for a moment if the mechanoid calling himself Hephaestus had undergone a similar transformation at some point.

No use in wondering, he thought. The darkness and world-rending pain chased this thought like a belligerant gorilla through the jungle of his being a moment later.

Lances pierced him from all sides, followed by the heaving crush of axes and the searing lash of swords about his body. Knight Man could feel the agony assail him in a dozen guises, but he could feel the weight of his mace in his hand. Yes, he thought, my mace, with which I can beat back this nightmare. My mace, with which I can fight through!

Carried through on this thought, he envisioned himself in his mangled body, one-armed, beating back hordes of imps and demons as they clawed for him. A faint blue light began to shine from his eyes, soon engulfing his body, and with a savage roar, the vision went purest white.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the world began taking shape again before his optics. With a start he realized he had two working optics again, seeing quite clearly through a window port. He was standing in a charging tube, or something similar. He felt oddly potent, more powerful than ever before.

Hephaestus was ten yards away, his left side facing Knight Man. But that lasted only a moment. The screen he'd been looking at now showed bars of sliding readings and text data. The red and white mechanoid turned to face Knight Man, and approached. His eyes held joy and excitement.

There was a rush of air, and then gravity kicked in. Knight Man felt heavy, but when the door swung open to the right, the Robot Master stepped out of the stasis pod and took a wobbling stance of readiness.

"Ah, you should see yourself," said Hephaestus. He scampered off, wheeling a full length mirror over in front of Knight Man, who could only stare in wonder at his new body.

He looked like a futuristic suit of demonic plate armor, tinged dark blue and purple. His optics were hidden behind a face grille on a horned helmet. He looked, in short, like an unholy horror. On his left hip was a huge mace with three prongs on its head.

Knight Man took up the weapon and held it aloft, watching electricity spark and ripple between the prongs.

"What do you think," asked Hephaestus.

"I think it is most wondrous," the Robot Master said, shocked by the demonic snarl that was his voice. "I can never thank you properly, except to now swear my fealty to you, as would any knight proper."

"Knight? No, my friend. You are no longer Knight Man."

"No?" Knight Man tried to raise an eyebrow, felt his helmet mimic the attempt. "Then who am I now?"

"Paladin," Hephaestus said, and the Robot Master nodded. It was well, he thought. All was well.

There came then a host of tests in an adjoining chamber, to help the mechinoid formerly known as Knight Man get used to his new body and its inherent abilities. Using holographic projectors, Hephaestus sat in a small control booth and made the test chamber look like a war-torn battlefield swarming with soldier-like robots.

The first new ability Paladin used was an energy shield, which projected in a curved wall of purple light when he held his left arm up in a shield-bearer's stance. Activating the shield took only a moment's thought. The only restriction, Hephaestus told him as mock bullets rebounded off of the shield, was that the shield followed the movement of his arm always when it was on.

"No different than my old shield, then," Paladin replied. He pivoted swiftly on his front heel, swinging his right arm out in a broad arc. The mace in his hand smashed into the hologram of a soldier bot, which fell apart to the ground. The impacts on shield and weapon felt quite real. "How is it these holograms have weight when I fight them?"

"Receptor falsifiers," the crimson and white mechanoid said behind his protective booth wall. "I'm feeding tactile input directly to your sensory systems via relay signals. If they hit you, you'll feel it and your system will respond. Not to worry, though; it's perfectly safe."

And Paladin felt several white laser bullets hit him then from the right. Flinching from the impact, he turned to face his unseen foe, and froze, fear tearing through his mind. "Megaman," he rasped. The Blue Bomber was much smaller than Paladin, now that he was in his new body, but that mattered not a whit; here stood the bot who'd essentially killed him.

"Remember what he did to you," Hephaestus said quietly through the speakers of the room. The scenery shifted, and Paladin was now back in his throne room. "Remember your rage as he shot you, over and over again. Let the rage be your tool, Paladin."

Paladin closed his optics for a moment, taking a deep breath. He didn't need the oxygen, but his programming allowed for human-like behaviors. He opened his optics, took a defensive stance with the shield held up, and put the mace back in its slot.

His right arm whirred and snapped, changing into a small catapult. A plate on his back slid open, and a high-yield contact explosive was deposited into the catapult's cup on a small segmented swing arm. Then Paladin roared a ghastly war cry, and launched the explosive.

It blew Megaman into a thousand sputtering, blackened pieces. Smoke curled through the air, heavy and cloying, but Paladin paid it no heed. His back plate slid shut, and his arm whirred back into shape.

"A most excellent outcome, my friend," said Hephaestus, shutting down the program. "Come, let us introduce you to your brothers."

Paladin followed his new master through several dozen twisting corridors in a massive complex. Bots worked away everywhere, many of them familiar to the core memories ported from his time as Knight Man; Hard Hats, Sliding Shockers, Green Meanies. All appeared to be engaged in construction and repair work. A fee stood about in small groups, chit-chatting, but these were few and far between, and the ones conversing differed in color from their working look-alikes.

"The ones that talk are the result of years of experimentation," Hephaestus said over his shoulder as he walked ahead of Paladin. "They all have persona programs, which act as artificial sparks."

"So, they are sentient?"

"In a way, yes. They each have a close approximation of individuality. These ones are put in charge of platoons of their bot type."

"That must be useful."

"Indeed. It frees me up to do my real work, you see." Hephaestus stopped at an elevator, and when they entered, he pushed a button marked 'W'.

"Where are we going now?"

"To the level of the complex reserved for you and your kinsmen. I believe one of them is out on a mission right now, but he should be back any time now." The slightly larger mechinoid put a heavy hand on Paladin's shoulder. "You are the last, my friend. All are now gathered. I have been working toward this moment for longer than you could imagine."

As Hephaestus drew his hand back, a question came, unbidden, from Paladin. "Master, what year is this?"

"2152," came the reply. Paladin went stock still; he'd been lying dormant, at death's door, for a hundred and twenty years, roughly. A century had gone by, while he lay in a broken heap, forgotten by the world. Surely his old Master, Dr. Wily, was dead and gone by now.

As the elevator came to a stop, the doors whooshed open, and Paladin followed Hephaestus out into a entrance lounge of some sort. Plush and regal, it had the style of a Persian palace chamber. Across the room from them were a set of black double doors. On the left and right walls, two steel shuttered gates, of the variety that Wily had used to lead in and out of the combat chambers of his Robot Masters.

Paladin pointed to a skull insignia above these gates, each with a yellow 'W' stamped in the forehead. Hephaestus loosed a low chuckle. "Yes, I thought them appropriate. Your kinsmen, my other friends here, were also once Robot Masters. All of you were clinging, just barely, to life. Your sparks had not yet faded.

"Yet do not misunderstand me," the larger mechanoid said, walking toward the double doors. "You will not recognize any of them at first. They will all have new bodies, like yours, made into perfect machine-men."

"How many of us are there, Master," Paladin asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer. As Hephaestus opened the double doors, revealing a kind of war room dominated by a round table, he chuckled. Seven other mechinoids looked up at them as they stepped inside. One of them was just sitting down.

"Why, eight, Paladin," said Hephaestus. "It's always eight."

Chapter Three

Deepening

Detective Marlow transferred the data X provided him with to a new folder titled 'Sept 14, 2152', and shook his head. Nothing seemed to have advanced much, in his opinion, since the first Labor Bot had been released in 2019. Sure, weapons and defense and even medical technologies had thrived, but the advent of intelligent robots had driven any other technological considerations so deep into the ground that only a mole could get at them. A mole on crack, he thought with a wry grin.

Take the famous reploid standing a few feet away, for example. Marlow didn't like him; it wasn't anything personal. He knew the history of X, like any other human on Earth. But meeting him in person felt no different than meeting any other mechanoid. There was a natural distrust wrapped around his mind of such things.

"I have a couple more questions for you, X," Marlow said, jotting down his question with a pen on a small notebook. X turned to face Marlow, and immediately felt his temper rise to a dangerous level. He didn't like this detective, not a bit. It wasn't anything personal; he was just too much of an anachronism for comfort. The man had arrived in an early-20th century sedan, the kind with no autopilot. Everything about the vehicle was manually operated, except for a gps system to navigate by. He used an old writing implement and notebook instead of a datapad for notation. And a minor detail, but telling to X's deep-ray analysis scanners; the man shaved with an old manual razor, instead of an Auto-Groomer.

Old world and new world met in a front that could spiral into a tornado under the right circumstances. These were not such, but close enough to keep everyone else on the scene well away from the human and the reploid.

"Ask, then," X said, clearly exasperated.

"How well did you know Mr. Fellows?"

"Not well at all," X said evenly, eyes on Marlow's hand as he scribbled on the pad. "I recall seeing him at the desk frequently."

"Mr. X, Mr. Fellows had been working here as a doorman and desk clerk for nine years. You mean to tell me you didn't know him at least a little bit?"

"Not to be rude, but he hardly registers in my memory banks," X huffed. "I've usually been too busy to notice him. Until recently, I rarely even made use of my apartment."

"So, you don't know if anyone might've wanted to harm him?"

"No, I don't. I know only his name, the fact that he worked the desk, and that he was apparently killed in a horrible fashion."

"You can say that again," chimed in the middle-aged medical examiner. Of course, middle-aged nowadays meant mid-to-late sixties; the average human life expectancy in 2152 was 140 to 150 years. "The shallow slashes came first, then the stab wounds to the major nerves. The bleeding from his throat finished him off, but he took a few minutes to die. My scanner says he bled out before he could drown on his own blood, but only by a minute or so. This man died badly."

X and Marlow looked each other in the eyes silently for a moment. Whoever had done this had been absolutely ruthless. Both men were now wondering who could possibly be so cruel, and how they had managed to disable the cameras in the lobby before killing Andrew Fellows.

When detective Marlow left, he had a sneaking suspicion a Maverick was finally active again, and that X and his organization had dropped the ball.

X, watching the detective leave, suspected the humans had a new psychotic on their hands, and that they had been the ones to mess things up. Each man was wrong, and only time would tell them how.

X tried not to think about the scene down in the lobby, but even as he pulled up his personal archives, his mind wandered back to the body. Fellows had been butchered, that much was plain. That such meticulous wounds had been delivered in a frenzy was out of range, though. He realized that now.

Each slash and stab had been crippling and clean. His own on-board analysis programs told him each wound had been delivered in less than a second. The whole attack had lasted maybe ten seconds.

No human was that fast, even with two knives.

So, a bot. A malfunctioning service bot, perhaps, but only the soldier-class ones would know how to wield weapons like that. Soldier-class bots all stayed on their assigned bases, though. Even malfunctioning ones could not leave their assigned zones.

Worker bots didn't have enough finesse for this either, he thought. That left only one possibility for X; a Maverick. There were over six-thousand reploids in Central City. Any one of them could have gone rogue. But of those six-thousand, only five-hundred were combat-readied. Of those, three-hundred and twelve were Hunters.

The remainder worked for law enforcement agencies. X shook his head, deciding to leave that trail go for the time being. He wasn't a cop. Until the local authorities could confirm the presence of a Maverick, he would not get involved.

So X used his home console to enter the restricted zone coordinates from Veris's gathered reports. The system immediately spat back information files, and he opened the first three.

The first one said 'Bubble Man Zone', and what followed was a description of a kind of half-submerged operations base. At the end of the report, the words "Wily Campaign 2. Summarily defeated by Megaman. Closed off for eventual recovery.'

X blinked numbly at the screen. He moved on to the second report. 'Gemini Man Zone', ending with "Wily Campaign 3. Summarily defeated by Megaman and Rush. Closed off for condemnation and recovery." The third one was the same, but for "Crystal Man Zone".

X didn't even have to go through the rest of the reports to figure out what he thought might be going on. Instead, he shut down his archive system, looked out of his window to the darkened city, and decided it was time to finally have a talk with his predecessor.

"Time to see you, Megaman," he whispered.

"You must submit to weapons lockdown, sir," the camouflaged, tank-like reploid said sternly. An exact twin of the heavy mechinoid stood to X's left, a giant turret cannon on its shoulder aimed squarely at his head. "There are no exceptions," the first one was saying.

X had expected high security at the Light Complex, but this seemed ridiculous. He and Zero were the seniormost Hunters, for God'd sakes! Why would either of them cause trouble? With a sigh, he held out his left arm. The first heavy-duty reploid clamped a silvery ring device on it, and turned a key on the top, pulling it out.

"Sorry, sir. It's policy," the big man said in a humbled, almost shamed, tone.

"It's okay," said X gently. "You're doing your duty. I commend you both." Even the silent twin looked away at that, and the meshed gates slid silently open for him. X stalked quickly inside the building.

The entrance chamber was a sprawling museum of sorts to Dr. Light and his achievements, the last of which was the design and initial stages of building Megaman X. X looked at the schematics of himself on a holographic display, and shuddered. He'd been so underpowered at first, it was a wonder he wasn't dead.

Curiously, there was no such display for Zero. X made a mental note of this, then passed into a long, narrow corridor filled on either side with enlarged photos of his predecessor, Megaman. Originally a young man in a mechanized suit, Rock had been forced to be fused into the suit over the course of his third and fourth campaigns against Dr. Wily, due to injuries sustained in battles. The last photo on the right before the hallway ended in a set of imposing black metal doors showed a weary Rock lying on a surgical table.

Under the framed photo was a digital reader, which X scanned through. It was a report/essay written by Dr. Light, talking about the very final procedure Rock had, the transfer of his brain and spinal cord into a brand new suit after his sixth campaign against Wily. Light delved into the philosophical throughout the paper, which was a rare departure for the esteemed roboticist.

Yet the project had paved the way for the advent of the reploid race. Shortly after Rock's eighth war against Wily and his robots, Light discovered in the wreckage of a recovered Robot Master something he called 'The Spark', a form of energy previously unidentified. In essence, Thomas Light had discovered the artificial soul of all sentient mechinoids.

A cult-like group of human scientists began studying spark phenomena shortly after Light's death in 2055. Reploids began making their appearance throughout the world three years later.

X shook off these thoughts and pushed through the black doors into a surprisingly normal-sized lounge of some sort. There were three plush leather couches in the center of the room, arranged in an incomplete square. Dominating the left wall was an enormous flat screen monitor. X felt a floor panel click under his feet as he looked right, spotting an open bathroom and a small dining area.

The screen on his left flickered to life, showing a maintenance chamber. Standing in the middle of the screen, tall and pale blue, was a smiling Megaman. Speakers hidden around the room crackled to life. "Well, I was starting to think you'd never visit," Megaman said with a smirk. X stared in wide wonder at the screen, squaring himself to face his predecessor.

"Sir, it is an honor," X said, snapping off a smart salute. Megaman returned the gesture.

"Have a seat," Megaman said, and X did, directly across from him. "So, I imagine you have a lot of questions."

"I'm sorry, I do, but it's taking me a moment to get used to this. Um, how are you in there? Your brain was organic."

"Dr. Light was able to use a brain scan to copy my thoughts and brainwave activity," Megaman said. "He then installed a miniature scanner in my helmet to record everything. I'm Rock, but I'm also not. My organic brain died back in 2061."

"Oh," said X quietly. "Then, your personality?"

"Dr. Tenkian, chairman of the Spark Research Council, was able to find what he called a 'Blank Spark' to install into this network. I have a spark, same as you."

"Ah, I see. This is all very confusing," X admitted.

"Tell me about it," Megaman replied wryly. "So, what did you want to know?"

"Okay, I suppose my first question is this; when you defeated Wily's Robot Masters, how did you absorb their weapon programs?" There was a pause as the scene on the monitor changed. Megaman was suddenly standing in a large power generator room, on the left side of the screen. Duct work and power panels lay broken, live wires slapping about everywhere. On the right side of the screen, crouched down, was a wounded robot with a stylized lightning bolt for a faceplate; Elecman.

Megaman's voice spoke from the speakers. "The program operation wasn't difficult. When I fired the final shot," Megaman said, as his representation on-screen fired a white power bullet at Elecman. The spheroid struck, and Elecman was thrown back, clouds of smoke and bits and pieces of metal frame flying apart. "My cannon immediately turned back into a hand. Then, the absorbing program began running."

X watched as Megaman stalked up to the downed Robot Master, opening a panel on his arm. He pulled out a connection cord, and pried open the side of Elecman's head unit. He plugged the cord in, and flashed twice with a red energy. "The cannon adapted the Robot Master's attack into a form I could use."

X contemplated the image before him as it began to fade, replaced by the previous view with one exception. Megaman was now seated in a tall-backed leather chair. "That's a little different than my own cannon. Mine absorbs latent energy from Mavericks' weapons systems throughout battle and reconfigures it to mimick their attacks."

"I know," said Megaman. "I have access to all but a dozen or so systems in the Hunter Organization. Those ones I can't get into employ some extremely potent defense setups. I can similarly access any civilian or external network if they're open and running defenses I can work through. There are plenty that I can't, and I don't do it often. But I do get bored in here sometimes."

"Are you aware of time passing?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes," Megaman said with a sigh, folding his arms over his chest. "I frequently turn off the internal clock on my primary drive so that I don't get antsy or bored. Now, anything else?"

X looked away for a minute, organizing his thoughts. He lined up several questions in his mind, then proceeded. "Do you know about the murder in my building earlier tonight?"

"Yes. Detective Marlow has already filed his initial report. He suspects a Maverick is on the prowl."

"Okay," said X. "Do you have access to the building's video surveillance logs?"

"Yes," said Megaman. There was a pause, then the screen flickered a moment before settling back to normal. "Sorry, I was retrieving the files for view and analysis."

"Good. Is there any sign of who cut the surveillance feed," X asked. He noticed a moment before, when the screen first came back on after the flicker, a small glitch in the lower-right portion of the screen. It had flashed by in milliseconds, but X knew what he'd seen.

It had been part of a file folder icon, and X had caught sight of the word 'Project' in the title. He would ruminate on that later.

"There is no visual trace of who cut the footage," Megaman said. "However, system readings from the building's security network show that a service panel along the roof was manually unlocked and opened. There's a trace of an access cable being disconnected in the basement core fifteen minutes later."

X blinked rapidly at this information. "Anything else?"

"Yes," said Megaman. "According to the logs, that maintenance panel didn't close again until after detective Marlow had left the scene. Footage from the street lamp across the road shows him leaving, and five minutes later, the access panel closed."

"Then the killer was still there," X breathed. "He was watching us."

"That does seem likely," said Megaman. Another flicker from the screen. X caught sight of the file folder in the bottom right corner of the screen this time; 'Omega Project'. Again, he filed this away for later consideration. "Listen, I'll soon have to go into a sweep mode to check for anomalies. I'm sure you've noticed some issues already with this interface."

"I did," said X evenly. "I didn't want to point it out. Thought it might be rude."

"That's never stopped you before, has it, X?" X grinned guiltily and shook his head. "I can take one last question. Anything you want." X thought for a moment, and decided to indulge one of his most recent curiosities.

"Megaman, I was designed by Dr. Light. Who was Zero first designed by?"

"Ah, yes, I've only been asked that by one other reploid, Zero himself. He visited just before heading to Moon Base 2."

"And?"

"Zero was initially designed by Dr. Franklin Reginald Wily, X." X gasped, staring wide-eyed at the monitor as it began to fade to black. "Your reaction to this information is about the same as Zero's was. Sorry if I've upset you."

And then the screen was dark, and X was left in silence.

Chapter 4

Testing

The droning of a system alert from his work station brought X out of his slumber in the charging tube. He felt himself come groggily up over the side, and then he seated himself in his desk chair.

He had an incoming alert message from Hunter HQ. Now he felt himself come fully awake. He opened his communication window, and saw Sherry, a blonde-haired support reploid, looking harried as she locked eyes on X. "Sherry, what's going on?"

"It's Torque," she said in a rush. Tears tracked down her cheeks, reminding X that she, like many reploids these days, had taken on a number of implants and additions to make herself more closely resemble a human. "Sir, he's been killed!"

"What? When? Where is he?" X felt his chest tighten; figuratively speaking, of course. He possessed none of the human-like artificial organs now common to his kind, but he had a spark. This alone allowed him to feel like a human at times.

"It was during his patrol out at one of the restricted zones north of the city, sir. God, I saw the photos, sir! I can't believe it."

"Give me the coordinates," X barked, anger and suspicion warring within him.

"What?"

"The coordinates," X shouted, slamming his hand down on his desk. "Give me the location! I have a transporter pod on the roof here! I'll go and see for myself!" Sherry nodded mutely, sniffling as she click-clacked on her keyboard. The coordinates popped up on X's terminal screen. He took a quick image save on his temporary optic drive and shut off his console, racing to the rooftop.

X stormed up to a flat, circular pad of golden-hued metal on the building's roof. Four shimmering red nodes stood at compass points around a bubbled glass-like surface. As X stepped on the bubble, a holographic control panel appeared before him. He tapped in the coordinates from his optic drive file, wiping the image file as soon as he hit the 'transmit' key.

In a swirl of silvery light, X vanished.

Several soldier-class bots scattered and trained weapons on the silver bolt coming down out of the sky, but as soon as X materialized, their unit commander waved them off. A hulking reploid, he had been modeled on an enormous, purple silverback gorilla. X thought immediately of the ape-like training bots, but dismissed this notion. It had almost put a smile on his face, and that wouldn't be appropriate here.

"Commander X," rumbled the other reploid, standing to attention. "Swing Gollit reporting, sir!" The big man saluted, and X returned the gesture curtly.

"Where is he," X asked, wasting no time. Swing started marching away, looking over his shoulder to respond.

"Over this way about fifty meters. We have no idea what happened, and since the surveillance bots assigned to accompany him are missing, I doubt anything will be forthcoming." X followed Swing silently, jaw clenched tight.

As soon as they came within sight of the mangled metal and wire corpse, X's suspicions were confirmed. Multiple slash and stab wounds, delivered with blades of some unknown material and efficacy. What was left of Torque, a sports-car-themed reploid, looked an awful lot like Fellows's body had the day before.

The wounds were laid out in almost the exact same pattern. Only two major differences stood out. Firstly, Torque's bulbous optics had been torn out of his head, which had been shaped like a mix of a hot rod engine and a face. Secondly, Torque's whole left arm had been sliced clear off of his body and tossed several meters to one side.

"His weapons never discharged," Swing said, crouching down over the dead reploid. "The medical bot says the time between the first blow and the last was probably less than ten seconds. We've got a few in the ranks capable of that kind of speed, sir."

X considered this point, but shook his head, going through the Hunters' roster in his mind. "We do, but none of them use melee weapons capable of punching through grade-3 transteel. Grade-2 maybe, but Torque was one of our best. You're a grade-3 chassis, aren't you, Swing?"

"Yes sir," the simian mechanoid replied, looking down at the body again. "Not many of us upgraded to that yet. You and commander Zero get first crack at the grade-4 stuff if they ever get it down, right?"

"Yes, but development is slow going on it. Other concerns take up too many resources. The moon bases," X said, unable to entirely mask his annoyance. "Anything else the medical bot was able to decipher?"

"Just one thing, sir, and it wasn't the medical bot that found it." Swing stood up and a part of his belly slid outward. He plucked something out, held it up. It was a slender electro-knife, shaped like an assassin's dagger. "It was embedded in one of the stab wounds, sir. I have a deep energy analysis bot coming to collect it."

"Excellent," X said, finally feeling some kind of relief. He was about to ask for the rest of Swing's report when he had a curious notion. "Swing?"

"Sir?"

"You ever hear of something called the Omega Project?" Swing looked up and to one side, rubbing his slack lower jaw in contemplation. After a moment he looked at X and shook his head, somewhat abashed.

"Sorry, sir. I'm not exactly built for smarts. Wrecking Mavs and berserk robots is more my skill set." X just grinned and patted Swing on the shoulder. "Anyhow, we're going to move the body in just a few minutes. The restricted zone here was once used by Dr. Wily's minions. Belonged to a bot called Skull Man."

X looked behind him, over to where there was a break in the fifteen-foot high stone walls that had been erected around the restricted zone over a century before. "Very good. You may carry on, captain."

"Sir," said the other reploid, saluting. X stomped determinedly over to the break in the wall, where high, electrified wire gates stood. Four humans stood in military gear in front of the gate, looking nervous. X could hear their whispered conversation from twenty meters away.

"-know about it as well as I do. There's nothing for it."

"What do we say if he wants to go in? He's got clearance."

"Since when?"

"Order came down this morning," one of the guards said in an authoritative tone. "Now shut up. Here he comes." X stepped up and stood before the guards, all now at attention. "Megaman X, sir," said the ranking guard, the man who'd spoken last. X realized as he looked at them that while he recognized their rank stripes, he couldn't identify their uniforms.

"Sergeant," X said, his brow furrowing. "Tell me, what department are you with?"

"United States Air Force, sir," the sergeant replied.

"What division?" The tall human looked suddenly nervous, and X could see the man's Adam's apple bob as he swallowed hard.

"Human Intelligence Division, sir." X had never heard of any such group within the Department of Defense. He keyed in on the word 'Human', sensing something amiss. Without hesitation, X activated several deep-level audio analysis programs, and continued.

"And who is your commanding officer?"

"Captain Bridges, sir," the sergeant replied. X activated an extra visual scanner relay, and sighed.

"What was your division again?"

"Human Intelligence Division."

"Under which branch?"

"United States Air Force."

"Liar," X snarled, taking a step back. The sergeant blinked rapidly, but he and the other three guards just stood stock still, looking straight ahead. "You're all sweating bullets. Dipthong fluctuations indicate you're lying to me, sergeant, though not about everything. Now, as a Hunter, I am well within my authority to have you all locked up under suspicion of treason. Do you want that?"

All four men shook their heads rapidly. X proceeded, now walking up and down their newly formed line. "You aren't lying about everything, though," X said quietly, just loud enough for the four guards to hear him. "Your ranks are relative. None of you is an Airman. The man in charge of you is not a sergeant, though he is the ranking man here. Now, I want someone other than the sergeant to tell me, what is your division?"

"Human Intelligence Division," said the shortest of the guards, a broad-shouldered black man built like a melee fighter. X's programs told him this was true.

"Someone else. What branch?"

"United States Air Force," said another guard, a younger man. There, thought X, is the lie. He wheeled on the young man, looking down into eyes that rattled slightly as the man tried not to blink.

"Name," he snapped.

"Eddings, sir!"

"Rank."

"Airman, sir!"

"Pure lies, both," X rumbled. Now, he thought, it was time to get some real answers. His right arm snapped out, his hand around the human's throat, while his left arm switched to cannon mode in less than the blink of an eye. Yellow light poured forth as he charged the Mega Buster. "Let's try again," X shouted like a madman, giving the terrified, gasping human a leering smile. The other humans, transfixed, stared in horror. "Name!"

"Peter Long," the guard rasped, eyes bulging. "Special Agent Peter Long, NSA!" X tossed the man back with a shove, spinning to aim the cannon at the faux sergeant.

"National Security Agency, hmm? And why, pray tell, would you gentlemen be pretending to be Airmen? Are you not supposed to be here?"

"Look," said the sergeant in a quavering voice. "Let me speak with my field commander, see if he wants me to read you in. Just please, put down the cannon."

"And if I don't," X asked softly, his expression now flat, cold and calculated. The faux sergeant shook his head and coughed.

"Then we get chalked up as imposters, and life moves on. We were instructed to say nothing to you unless pressed. If that happens, and clearly it has, I contact the field officer." X lowered his cannon, his hand ejecting from the port to make him less menacing. He rolled his arms and shoulders, and nodded to the sergeant.

"Contact him. I want to know what's going on here."

Paladin reviewed the report on a console in his private quarters of the base, impressed with Shinobi's detailed style. It was unfortunate that the mechinoid formerly known as Shadow Man had lost one of his blades, but human guards had been on their way to see what Torque's lone shout of alarm had been about.

The surveillance bots had been snatched at the last moment, and for thinking that far ahead in the heat of the moment, Paladin could do naught but praise his kinsman. Still, he worried about this early phase of master Hephaestus's plan. The key to it all lay in making certain none of them directly confronted X yet. They each had a part to play, toying with the legendary Maverick Hunter at a distance, leaving him stunned and confused.

Except Paladin himself. Hephaestus had been very clear about that. "You will communicate reports to me directly, though I will not be here," the crimson and white mechinoid had told him in the transporter room after their initial group meeting. "You will use the comm link in your chambers. I will be overseeing another project for much of the first phase. While I am away, you are in command. The others already know this."

And then Hephaestus had teleported away, leaving Paladin alone in the transporter room with its panels and displays. Shinobi's part in the first phase was now over. Orbous, formerly Crystal Man, oversaw the task of spying on X and the Hunter Organization; for now, he would do nothing.

Orbous, who looked like a cross between an arachnid and a man made of green metal, a single dome of shining glass-like material on his belly. He looked almost ridiculous compared to the futuristic ninja, Shinobi. But Orbous had been granted abilities that made him quite dangerous. He could command any standard bot within a ten mile radius, if they had no spark.

Paladin had just finished sending Shinobi's second report when he began his ruminations. Poseidon would be the next to play out his bit in phase one. Once Dive Man, the aquatic Robot Master now looked like a shark-like lycanthrope, his mouth lined with jagged, shining metal teeth. Each one was filled with a ballistic charge, and could destroy grade-3 transteel on impact.

After Poseidon's part would come the final part of phase one. The largest and strongest of their number, Titan, would start the final act, joined by Twim and Thrash. They had been, respectively, Guts Man, Gemini Man, and Quick Man, as Robot Masters. Of them all, only Titan and Paladin bore close resemblances in any way to their old bodies.

Caretaker, however, had gone with Hephaestus to the other project. Once the Robot Master Junk Man, the tall, sallow mechinoid had been given a new body fashioned after some sort of mechanical zombie or Frankenstein's Monster. His head unit resembled a dessicated human skull with synthskin stretched over the left half of the face plating. He was, in a word, ghoulish.

Hephaestus had sent Caretaker ahead immediately after that first meeting. Paladin wanted to hold another one, but would have to wait until Caretaker returned and all the others were present. It wouldn't do to have to repeat himself or lose out on possible conversation.

For now, he decided, he would meet with them all individually. Exiting his private quarters (tailored to resemble those of a Victorian lordship), Paladin made his way down a set of hallways until he stood outside of Orbous's door. Slate gray and utilitarian, the door slid open at the touch of a panel.

Inside the primary chamber, two whole walls were devoted entirely to monitors and control panels. Orbous sat on a rolling swivel chair, his multifaceted eyes peering in every direction at once. "Paladin, what brings you by," Orbous hissed. Even his voice made Paladin think of spiders.

"I wish to speak with you," he said, locating a second rolling chair and bringing over toward Orbous. "See how you're adjusting."

Orbous turned his head toward Paladin, and the mechninoid warrior could feel every lens in those oversized eyes scrutinizing him. Angled mandibles clacked together rapidly, then went still, opened apart in front of the mouth proper. "I could be doing much worse, actually. This body has taken some getting used to, but I've had nearly six months to adjust. How about yourself?"

"I seem to be doing fine," Paladin replied, shifting so that his right arm was cocked out, palm on knee. His left forearm lay across his thighs, and he shook his head. "This body is much larger than my Knight Man chassis. But its also more powerful and flexible. I don't feel so rigid."

"Yes, I had noticed that about myself right away," said Orbous. He half-turned his head back to the monitors. "I 've been trying to keep an eye on X all morning. I think he's about to investigate the old Skull Man lair."

Paladin looked to the small monitors, but couldn't see which one had X in its sights. Orbous pointed to it, and Paladin flinched. "That's X?"

"Yes. He's rather intimidating at first glance. A lot more direct and unfriendly than his predecessor was. I could almost like him, in fact." Orbous used severalg dials and pointed to a screen directly in front of Paladin. "Plug into the audio jack." Paladin did so, drawing out a thin silver cord from the right side of his neck, plugging it into an audio port.

Orbous played back X threatening a guard at the gates to the Skull Man ruins. Paladin, thunderstruck, just shook his head slowly. "Unbelievable! This new Megaman is not someone to take lightly."

"No. But the master's plan will leave him feeling quite a lot less confident. He'll see, in those ruins. And he'll see afterwards, when Poseidon's trap is sprung."

Paladin hoped, for all of their sakes, that Orbous was right.

Chapter 5

Old World Blues

The very first thing the faux sergeant told X after being instructed over the phone to tell the reploid everything, was that the NSA only monitored a handful of the old Robot Master facilities and sites. "There's nuclear missile silos under a couple of them, and five top secret DOD facilities that Wily just took over back in the day," he told X. "The DOD gave the NSA jurisdiction over those zones. They're monitored a lot more closely than the others, which are mostly being recovered finally."

X felt a rush of relief at all of this. No grand conspiracy here, at least, not one he had to worry about. Just human governments being secretive, amd that was about as normal as the sky being blue. He could handle this.

However, a new problem presented itself with the news of Skull Man's compound having been atop a nuclear silo. If the Maverick who'd killed Torque had done so in order to get inside, there could be trouble. Armed with a nuclear missile, the unknown reploid could do a lot of damage, especially if only one human government knew about its existence.

Realizing all of this, he suspected the reason he'd been cleared to enter was so the United States Department of Defense could scapegoat the Hunters in case the Maverick succeeded in whatever he was planning.

X felt like a fool.

"I'm going in there," X said to the agent in charge, who pulled out a small control switch from his BDUs and pushed a button. The gates opened wide, revealing clearly a painted concrete path to the blocky structure of Skull Man's old zone. "Tell your superiors not to worry. X has everything under control."

He thought he caught a look of guilt in the agent's eyes on his way past.

The doors had been nearly rusted shut, but X shoved them open with a grunt and heave. Inside, the first chamber was a long corridor covered in dusty old plastic reproductions of human bones. His scanners told him most of the corridor had been untouched for over a century.

However, a single set of tread tracks terminated at a tranporter pad twenty meters to his left. Someone had been in here, someone or something mechanical. The transporter was an old Wily model, used only for non-organic material. It looked to be on its last legs, but X's deep range scanners told him there was still a little charge left in the device.

Not that he could operate it, though. His internal security drives would negate the device as unrecognized and unwelcome. He wondered if the old mechinoids of Megaman's time had been nearly as sophisticated in design. "Probably not," he muttered to no one.

X marched down the corridor, finding a steel hanging ladder at the end in front of a solid wall. Rather than traverse it, he opened up his cannon, charged it to full power, and blasted a hole right through. Cement and metal flew out, along with sparks and smoke. Something rumbled around him, and X thought he might have blown out a main support structure. "Taking the ladders from here on," he said, walking carefully through the rubble.

On the other side of the hole stood a tall, perfectly square room. Scraps of metal lay everywhere, as well as more of those plastic bones. In the center of the room lay the remains of some sort of giant skeletal cyclops. Half of its head had been blown off, and blaster holes stood in stark contrast along its chest and legs.

"Megaman," X muttered, staring at the construct. "How did you fight things like this, being so small?" X was about to walk past to the bent gate door opposite when an alarm shot through his system. He jumped back quickly to the hole he'd made, as one of the mechanical giant's arms rose shakily from the ground. Plastic bones and debris clattered to the ground as the bot slowly rose to a sitting position. Its lone, baleful eye shone with with a virulent purple light.

X started to charge his cannon, but the slow-moving giant lashed out with one of its damaged legs, kicking X and sending him against the wall beside his entrance hole. He yelped as pain ran through his back. The kick itself hadn't done any damage, but his back armor was thinner than the front of his body. He landed in a crouch, cannon charge continuing.

"All right, you heap of scrap," he snarled. "Let's do this!" With a shout, X stood tall and fired the Buster Shot at the cyclops. Its entire upper body and head disintegrated, and the shot dissipated after slamming into the bent gate, knocking it over with a heavy clang.

X walked past the remains, stopping for a moment to stomp on the eye unit that had flown out when the Buster Shot struck.

X walked along another long, high-ceilinged chamber, piles of wreckage everywhere. This, he surmised, was where reclamation crews deposited the waste, scrap and rubble before pulling out upon discovery of the nuclear facility underground. Among the piles, X stopped, looking down at a chunk of familiar blue armor, and the shattered remains of Skull Man.

The scrap of armor looked badly singed, blown off during the original Blue Bomber's fight with the Robot Master. X examined it closely; it was old harsteel, the base material that would later be refined to make transteel. He smirked, marveling that this used to be the top standard. Tucking the scrap away in a sliding leg hatch, X turned his attention to the Skull Man remains.

The head unit, styled after a cartoon rendition of a human skull, was battered badly. Part of the neck cable hung limp from the bottom. X might have simply moved on, but for a single observation. There were scorch marks in the cable, but not from any blaster weapon; they came from the cable, which was torn.

X carefully picked up the head, noticing four deep indentations on the right side of the face plating, and one under the chin shelf. Staring in shock, X felt himself go numb. "You ripped his head off," he rasped to himself. "Dear God, Rock, you ripped his head off."

Every account of the original Megaman's exploits had been clean, clinical, efficient. Never had X read anything to indicate that his predecessor was capable of such savagery.

X let the head roll off of his fingers, clunking to the ground.

The nuclear silo had been partially excavated, X saw as he stood on the edge of the chamber where Megaman and Skull Man had pitched their fatal encounter. He stared down at the ramp leading into the facility, and wondered, momentarily, why Wily hadn't just threatened to use the nuke.

Wily's campaigns of terror had always focused on building Robot Masters in an effort to dominate and enslave the human race. He could well have used a few nuclear warheads to accomplish much the same result, and at a fraction of the cost in money, time and materials. But then, mad scientists were supposed to be inscrutable, weren't they?

X shook his head. There was no sign of anything having been tampered with here. The Skull Man ruins had been unmolested, meaning his Maverick had come here specifically to kill Torque. X didn't like that idea, as it left him with no motive to work off of.

Still, there were all those other restricted zones that had been reported as having strange comings and goings. He opened the command panel on his right arm, keying in his return code to be brought back to his apartment building's rooftop. Whatever was going on, he couldn't investigate it alone.

Detective Jasper Marlow of Central City's Homicide Division looked over his notes in the living room of a plushly adorned apartment. He lived well, though he never made it too obvious. Marlow indulged in his tastes for old world culture largely by way of buying and selling stocks, something he seemed to have a real knack for.

He didn't need to work as a cop, hadn't needed to for a few years now. He was what one might refer to as a 'quiet millionaire', never one to brag or boast about his financial prowess or standing. He did his job because he loved it, and with the cost of many of his old world relics, he'd run out of money well before retirement age without a job.

The television, an early-21st century model flat screen LCD unit, belched out noise from a game of blast ball, a reploid sport that had been gaining popularity over the last couple of decades. It wasn't much different than football, but allowed for the use of non-lethal weapons against the ball carrier and took place on a five-hundred yard field.

With the game droning on unwatched, Marlow tried to make sense of the murder of the deskman at X's apartment building. He'd not handed over everything he knew to the legendary Maverick Hunter X. No, he'd made certain to keep one thing back, a detail that even his own crime scene technicians had overlooked.

While he'd been first viewing the twisted, mangled corpse, dust had sifted down onto his shoulder from the ceiling. Looking up slowly, Jasper Marlow had felt his blood turn to ice in his veins, his eyes locking on more particles of dust drifting down, shaken from movement just behind the vent grille.

Someone had been watching him, someone with enough murderous skill and intent to leave a man butchered in under half a minute.

At the time, he'd wanted to assume it was a reploid or bot, but couldn't discount the idea that the killer was human. Looking over his notes, he still couldn't say with any certainty which it was.

Setting his pen down, Jasper rubbed his temples, deciding that a bath and a nap were in order. He was halfway to the bathroom when the explosion rocked the building.

Chapter 6

Phase One Complete

The moment X arrived on his building's rooftop, internal warning systems blared to life in his central processing unit. Instinct told him to make a dashing leap off of the roof as his systems told him what the danger was; hundreds of hand-sized demolishions charges had been set up all over the top of the building.

The force of the explosion threw him a score of yards farther than his jump, already boosted by the short-burst thrusters in his feet. Scalding concrete and metal smacked and pattered against him, several bits scoring deep into his armor plating. As he fell toward the street, though, X thanked Light that nothing had punched through. Only a 3% life force loss, easily recovered when he had the chance.

Several yards above the street, he kicked on the boot thrusters, burning the concrete but otherwise leaving it unharmed. As he touched down, large sections of the building came crashing down behind him. Spinning around, X caught sight of a slab of concrete landing with a scrunch atop a swerving hovercar.

He had time to see the woman inside scream and reach out toward the windshield before the impact crushed her. Blood came shooting out of the driver's side window as the sedan flattened under the wreckage. Elsewhere up and down the street, the few humans and bots out at this hour screamed and fled for cover.

It was utter mayhem, and X stood in the middle of it.

Looking up, he saw another large section of the building falling toward the street. He quickly charged his cannon and fired a Mega Buster Shot, vaporizing the debris mid-fall. More shots, standard energy bursts, reduced several more chunks to dust as he ran along the street.

Sirens blared nearby, emergency response and demolitions bots and humans rushing to the scene. The explosion's force, he thought, should have done a lot more damage. His internal systems quickly calculated the power of the blast, and left him confused. He could only surmise that the charges hadn't all gone off.

On that score, he would soon be proven wrong.

"Poseidon has completed his objective," Paladin said to the holographic display of Hephaestus standing in the center of his private quarters. "The detonation went off as planned, but X was somehow able to avoid it almost entirely, sire."

"No matter, my friend," Hephaestus replied, waving one hand in dismissal. "The intent was not to blow him up, just to shock and rattle him. Caretaker's task here is nearly complete. We shall return at daybreak tomorrow. Phase two shall begin shortly thereafter."

Paladin nodded, pausing to consider his next inquiry. "Sire, I do not believe Titan is ready for his part in phase two. He is too eager for a fight with X."

"Oh? Do not hesitate, my friend. I am open to suggestions. I'm no Dr. Wily. I'll hear you out." Paladin heaved a sigh, and continued.

"Sire, I believe Titan will be badly damaged, if not destroyed outright, in a direct confrontation. We don't have zones like we once did, with hundreds of bot minions to weaken X before facing him. I fear X will have the upper hand."

"Ah, yes, I understand your trepidation," said Hephaestus. "However, I assure you, all is well. Titan's go-code will not be activated until after the first part of phase two has commenced. Remember, my Paladin, we are not here just to destroy X. Remember the plan, and do not deviate unless it's to save yourself. I need you and Caretaker to survive what is to come."

Paladin thought long and hard in silence, optics cast down. He did not doubt his master, nor his genius. But he worried that his colleagues would be too swift to want vengeance for the past, for what had been taken from them. Titan and Twim were both hot-headed, rash bots whose original designs made them both vicious killers. He doubted they had the self-control to stay in line with the master's plans.

"I shall hold faithful, sire," he said after five minutes of dead silence.

"Excellent. I shall see you and your brethren on the morrow, Paladin." The hologram disappeared then, the connection severed. Paladin sat down at his command console and put his head in his hands.

"The plan," he mused. "I must remember the plan."

X sat on the back of a reploid maintenance vehicle, letting Patch work on his scorched plating and filling his energy tanks back to maximum capacity. As he worked on X, the medical reploid, sculpted with a chassis that reminded one of a human ambulance, narrowed his eyes up at the building.

"Hell of a thing," he commented.

"You're telling me," X replied. "I didn't know you were on night duty."

"I'm not," said Patch. He detached the charger cable from X's main life force unit and closed his back plate. "I was awakened when your name came on the network as an injury. You're my main priority, you and Zero and Axl. Everyone else gets other bots to work on them."

"Command decision?"

"Yeah. We got six destroyed worker bots and one damaged enforcement patrol bot, other side of the block. Sixteen human casualties outside. No telling yet what the damage is like up there, though." X followed Patch's gaze skyward. He hopped off of the vehicle and started toward the building.

On his way to the entrance, he spotted once more the old manual sedan. Detective Marlow was back at his building. X spotted the detective in the lobby through the doors, talking to several humans in bomb squad gear. They were quite animated, and when X entered, they looked up and quickly shuffled away, out onto the street.

Marlow looked like hell warmed over. Dressed in a ratty pair of jeans and a yellow button shirt that had likely been pulled from a hamper, his eyes stood out of shadow-pocked features. When he met X's eyes, a new sharpness stole over him.

"X, would you please step over here with me," he asked gently, guiding X toward the eastern stairwell. They stepped through the door, Marlow keeping it open only an inch or two to keep an eye on the lobby. He looked hard at X, who frowned impatiently at him. "Someone wants you dead, X, and they don't give a shit how much blood they have to shed to do it."

"I'm guessing you know something I don't yet," X said evenly. He bore no more grudge against Marlow; clearly the man was impassioned to his job, to his duty. X could respect that, despite the man's obvious belligerence, or perhaps because of it.

"My bomb squad guys just got done explaining to me what happened up there. All of the charges were shaped to concentrate a single blast point, that teleporter pad on your roof," Marlow said quietly. "They were keyed in to detonate whenever you came back."

"I'm not the only Hunter in the building who used that pad," X said.

"Maybe not, but one of your programming bots discovered a link program in the pad's black box. Someone programmed it to send a signal to the charges only if you, specifically, returned to the pad." X swore under his breath. He had indeed been targeted, it seemed. "The bot tells me any demolitions specialist reploid could rig that kind of program."

"It's right about that," X said. "There's obviously a Maverick right here in Central City, then. The question now is, who?"

"I don't know," said Marlow with a huff. "I'm not familiar enough with your outfit to even have a guess, but my boss wants me and a couple of my guys to follow through. Humans have been killed here, and something tells me it's only going to get worse."

X nodded, thinking, doesn't it always?

It was one in the morning when captain Swing came to the doorway of X's office at Hunter HQ. The huge gorilla-like reploid held a datapad in his hands, looking ridiculous. This man, X thought, needs a war to look natural. "Come in," X said, pushing his central console to one side. Swing entered, quickly seating himself across from X and placing the datapad on the desktop.

"I just got the first five reports back, like you asked. We've got Hunters checking into each and every one of those restricted zones, and these ones finished their inspections first."

"Okay," X said, taking the datapad and rapidly scanning the reports. On the third one, he stopped, looking gravely up at captain Swing. "Hunter Pyrock says here he can't find any trace at all of the old Robot Master that was operating the zone. Has the chassis been accounted for?"

"No, sir," said Swing. "I already checked with the archives division and the DOD. Nobody knows where the remains are."

"So, Gemini Man is unaccounted for," said X, looking off into the middle distance at nothing. "Well, thank you, Swing. Have the rest of the reports mailed to my secure inbox, I'll review them when I can."

"Sir?"

"I have to pay another visit to my predecessor," said X, rising from his seat. "Keep everyone at arm's length for me for now, captain. That's all I ask." Swing nodded, leaving X to depart in studied silence.

Master Hephaestus would be much pleased, oh yes. Caretaker had done an excellent job with this last project, most amazing and marvelous! Perhaps master would be kind, and let Caretaker have a treat, yes, let him play a game. He so loved his games, yes he did!

Caretaker didn't know anything about malignant sparks or corrupted souls, or any number of other things the master muttered about to himself most of the time. No, Caretaker just knew he enjoyed playing with broken things, making them work again in all kinds of interesting ways. He liked to scare people, especially the soft, pathetic humans.

One of his most favorite games since being given his new body by the master involved taking the humans his master had gathered in secret places, and making them hurt in all kinds of fascinating ways. There were drills, blades, torches, all sorts of tools to make them squirm and scream and leak fluids. Oh, that was a lot of fun.

And when he was finished, why, the master let him keep the bits that were left! He could then take the soft bits and mix them with pieces of bots, make them into his favored playthings! Yes, master had told Caretaker to make lots of plaything puppets like that, and a really, really big one for master to control.

Soon, in a couple of hours, when master woke up from his charging pod, he and Caretaker would go back home. Master would control his enormous machine with the help of Caretaker's really big plaything, using a remote control that was much fancier than any of the ones Caretaker used.

Yes, in just a few hours, oh, what a game they would play!

X tapped the side of his head, the triangular orange plate lighting up and projecting a still image he'd recorded of the Skull Man head unit. On the monitor display, the simulated Megaman frowned. "Care to explain this, Rock?" There was nothing forthcoming right away from the Blue Bomber. Instead, the screen flickered, and suddenly Megaman was standing in an empty white paneled room.

"There wasn't any other choice," Megaman said slowly, his eyes narrowing. "My cannon was doing minimal damage. A blast from a drone only minutes earlier had severely reduced power output to the cannon."

"So you ripped his head off?"

"Don't take that tone with me," Megaman snapped, barring his teeth at X. "I've seen your solution to bots who go rogue! You're no better, X! At least I never got around to enjoying what I did!"

"He wasn't the only discrepancy, was he," X asked, folding his arms over his chest. "The records aren't squeaky clean because you were, but because Dr. Light didn't want the world to know what you were capable of."

"Okay, yes. There were times when I, lost control of myself," Megaman admitted. The scene changed again on the monitor to a Victorian study, replete with fireplace. Megaman took a seat before the fire. "There weren't many. And yes, some of the fighting got vicious. I confess. Are you happy now?"

But X realized he wasn't, not really. He hadn't been happy since last fighting Sigma. He took a seat of his own, head down between slouched shoulders. "No, I'm not happy. If I'm not fighting, I'm not happy."

"It's your spark," said Megaman softly. "Your spirit itself. Your spark belongs to a warrior, not an administrator. That's the heart of your problem. You're not a defender, X. You're an attacker. Only right now, you don't know who to attack."

X stiffened. Rock sounded too convincing to be wrong about his assessment. The human murdered in his building, the killing of Torque, and the bombing, all of them attacks on him that had no option for an immediate counter-strike.

"What do I do? I wasn't built just for combat. I've got the necessary intellectual skills to figure this out."

"Skills, but not the patience," Megaman said. "And your deductive reasoning and learning aren't on par with reploids built for investigative work. Your spark isn't that of a sleuth. Yes, you have the intelligence, but it's not what you're cut out for."

X glared at the monitor. "Again, what do I do right now?"

"Right now? I'd recommend you load up some of your best or most useful secondary weapons programs from the HQ database," Megaman suggested. "Run through a few simulations against enemies who might exhibit some of the behaviors that you've come across. Make yourself ready to move as soon as HQ learns something more."

X planted his hands on his hips as he stood, looking down at the floor. Simulation or not, the spark in this system that now called itself Megaman was wiser than X could have guessed before meeting it.

"I'll do just that," X said. "Thank you." X left then, watched by the cameras of the compound's internal monitoring system. When silence reigned once again in the room, the monitor went dark, and the original Blue Bomber's spark plunged back into the vast network of information available to it with glee.

Paladin entered the war room to find that Titan and Orbous were already present and seated to his right. Thrash stood off to the left, all angles and edges, looking like a walking bladed weapon.

"Any word of our sire, Orbous," Paladin inquired.

"He is speaking with Shinobi right now," the green mechinoid hissed. "They will be with us shortly, sir." Thrash chuckled derisively opposite the former Crystal Man. "Is there something amusing to you, Thrash?"

"You, calling him 'sir', that's what's so funny," Thrash said in his rapid, harsh voice. "He was Knight Man, for Wily's sake! He came after us! We shouldn't have to address him as sir!"

Titan slammed a powerful, blocky fist onto the table, shaking the whole room. "By your logic, then, you should address me as sir, Thrash! I am the only one here originally created by Dr. Light! No!" This last he barked as Thrash started to retort. "The master has named Paladin as our second in command! Do not question this, or I will rip you limb from limb!"

Strained silence filled the room as Thrash sneered angrily at Titan. He muttered something under his breath. "What was that," Paladin asked. Thrash whipped his head around faster than Paladin could visually track.

"I said if he could catch me first," Thrash shouted. In the next moment, Thrash yelped as the central table was heaved into his stomach, then pushed further to pin him against the wall. Titan stood on the opposite end, gripping the table with enormous, gray metal hands.

"Enough," Paladin cried out, unsheathing his mace. Titan immediately pulled the table away, letting Thrash slide down against the wall, holding his torso. "Thrash, are you all right?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," the angular mechinoid groaned.

"Titan?"

"Forgive me, sir. His disrepect demanded punishment."

"I agree," said Paladin coldly, his optics slit flashing crimson at Thrash. "However, in the future, I will determine suitable punishments in the master's absence. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," Titan said morosely. It was as Thrash was seating himself that the doors opened behind Paladin, letting Hephaestus, Shinobi, Twim, Poseidon and Caretaker into the room. Paladin saluted his master after sheathing his weapon, and seated himself at Hephaestus's right hand near the head of the table.

"Ah, my friends, a glorious day lies before us," Hephaestus began, spreading his arms wide like a preacher at service. "The first phase of my campaign is complete, and today, while our nemesis is still reeling, we shall begin the second phase of this momentous and audacious plan!

"I know that a few of you have raised questions," he continued, rising slowly from his seat, hands clasped behind his back. "What the endgame is, what I intend to do going forward. You want to know what my ambition is, at the last. I cannot yet tell you that, my friends, but for now, our goal is simple. We wreak havok upon the humans, and corner our foe, X, until the moment when we may cripple or destroy him."

"I like all of that," Twim said quietly. Formerly Gemini Man, the silvery mechinoid was the most human-looking of the collective, styled as an athletic humanoid. His split-minded nature had carried over, an essential part of his spark. When Paladin had set down to speak with him, he occassionally got two responses to a single question, often in two very different tones of voice.

Twim was, in essence, a mechinoid with dissociative identity disorder. In his case, his primary personality and his alter were more than aware of one another; they colluded to present a whole persona. As part of his programming, Twim could project an illusory duplicate of himself, which his alter controlled. This served to ease his symptoms, and make him a more efficient speed-type combatant.

Twim muttered a second response quietly, but Paladin's audio receptors, second only to Hephaestus and Orbous, picked it up; "I do too."

"Titan," Hephaestus said, continuing. "The first part of phase two has had an alteration. A minor one, I assure you," he said, pushing down Titan's objection before the enormous mechinoid could give it voice. "You will be going to New York City, and will remain hidden until X engages the Man Drone."

Titan raised a hand patiently, and Hephaestus nodded. Titan said, "Why did this change? I was looking forward to fighting X on his home turf."

"The decision came to me as a necessary precaution," Hephaestus replied easily. "Central City is home to the Hunters Headquarters. I won't send only one of you into that nest. No, it is best for now to keep Central City out of the picture. We proceed as planned from New York onward. Do you object?" Titan's brow furrowed as he considered the facts. He shook his head silently. He hadn't considered the other Hunters.

"Are there many Hunters in New York City," Poseidon asked, his voice a booming bass timbre.

"Three, that we know of," said Orbous. "Two of them are D Class, commanded by a C Class. They are no threat to Titan, or the Man Drone. Caretaker's work is most impressive," the green, semi-arachnid mechinoid hissed.

"Sire, mayhap we should send additional combat bots with the Man Drone," Paladin suggested.

"No need. I've already seen to that," Hephaestus replied. "For now, gentlemen, we are in a good place. Titan? Prepare for your departure. You leave in four hours."

Titan stood, saluted awkwardly, ambled out of the war room. His receding footfalls echoed for nearly a full minute. Of all of the new mechinoids' frames, his had been built to best suit a head-on, one-on-one battle. Paladin hoped he would not get overconfident, though, and expose himself to the threat of destruction.

"If there are any questions, gentlemen, I shall be in my quarters," Hephaestus said, dismissing the meeting. Everyone filed out except for Paladin and Orbous, who remained seated, looking to one another.

"How much of the plan do you know, Paladin," Orbous hissed quietly, leaning over the table. Paladin moved several seats down to be closer to his comrade.

"I know the next three phases," he whispered, "but not the fifth and final phase. And I tell you this, Orbous, because you more than the others will listen; there are contingencies. The master has already planned around any of our deaths, with two exceptions."

"Those being?"

"Myself and Caretaker. I don't understand that at all. Either one of us could be killed, but our own roles are distanced, minimal."

"I'm not surprised," said Orbous evenly. "You're the second-in-command, he needs you. Caretaker, though, he's addled. There's something very, very wrong with him." Paladin did not offer a rebuttal, as there wasn't one to be made, in this instance. He knew, as did Orbous, and likely everybody else, that the mechinoid who had been Junk Man was more than just damaged goods. Within the almost child-like behaviors lurked an unpleasant and unwholesome streak a mile long.

Orbous didn't know about Caretaker's 'playthings', though. Paladin shuddered to think of the imprisoned humans, many of them fated for death, some for a place even worse than the grave. What Caretaker did to those prisoners was beyond the veil of simple cruelty; it was pure psychosis.

Paladin knew that of them all, Orbous was clearly the most observant, the deepest thinker. The surveillance and systems expert knew the technical specifications of the Man Drone. If he'd seen a picture of the machine itself, though, as Paladin had, Orbous would easily surmise the full extent of Caretaker's activities.

"I know something of what ails Caretaker," Paladin said, looking away from Orbous. "His spark, the master informed me, was weak, tainted. Of us all, he was the closest to death. As Junk Man, he had already been derided and cast aside by his fellow Robot Masters. It's likely that whatever scars he bore from that time became further twisted by so much time teetering on the brink of annihilation."

Silence settled over the two mechinoids then, each privately wondering if all of their collective flaws could be overcome, and thus, victory achieved.

Chapter 7

First Blood

The legendary Maverick Hunter sat bolt upright in his charging pod, looking around hurriedly. Seeing the banks of other pods, he remembered that he'd chosen to rest in the HQ community charging chambers after using the VR simulator to run through some exercises. Rock's suggestion had been a sound one, from one warrior to another.

X had gone through a dozen different simulated VR battles, each one against the fiercest Mavericks he'd ever squared off with. In each fight, he varied his augmented weapons systems, his attack and evasion patterns, and his reflexive counterattacks.

The last four battles had been brutal, and the very final had been against Sigma. That program always pushed him to his limits, but as always, he won out, beaten and bruised. Today, after a review of Swing's inbound reports, he would try a different tack.

X went to his own office up on the sixteenth floor, checked the inbound reports, and filed them away. Only one showed interesting data; the remains of Quick Man were missing. Progress had slowed, though, as Snake Man's body had been blown to hell and breakfast, then scattered around his old zone by reclamation crews. Putting together all of his parts had taken nearly 24 hours.

The reports on those zones would take longer to come out now, leaving X to believe he had plenty of time to run some more VR drills. He didn't know it then, but he would only go through four before all hell broke loose.

"Is anything going to go our way," Bang Hurricane grumbled, slapping his cards down on the table. Styled like a giant barn owl, the Hunter frowned across at his partner, Keen Shotburst. Shotburst, a bulky brown and green camoflaged reploid with a gatling laser mounted on each shoulder and a high-impact ballistic cannon on his left arm, tossed his own cards down and frowned.

"Don't you like the quiet," the bigger bot rumbled.

"It's not bad, but the humans don't want us here, don't need us here. We're barely active even when we have a mission!" Bang shot up out of his seat, toppling it with a bang. "There's been nothing for us to do!"

"Don't wish for trouble, Bang," said a third reploid, standing in the doorway of the empty hangar that was their operations center in New York City. Based heavily on an old Dr. Wily design, the newcomer had the appearance of a walking Zippo lighter. "I frankly agree with Keen. It's good to have no fights to dash off to."

"Scorcher, this is different," Bang whined, slumping before his commanding officer. "It isn't like Central City, or Los Angeles, or hell, even Las Vegas. There's only the three of us out here, for a city this size! I need more interaction, and the humans here don't provide anything resembling pleasant conversation!"

"Well, it may please you to know, then, that our long-range scanners have picked up an anomaly," said Scorcher with a grin. Bang stiffened, his wings flapping once in excitement. "Large power fluctuation inbound off the coast, coming pretty slow. Coast Guard said they detected bots, but no active weapons systems. We may have some company yet."

Bang hooted with joy at the prospect of meeting other mechinoids, while Keen Shotburst just looked his commander in the eyes. There was a barely perceptible nod between them, a shared understanding. The Coast Guard had detected no active weapons systems. That didn't mean there were no weapons waiting to be readied.

The first of the old Robot Masters X loaded into the VR system to face off against was the infamous Elec Man. Fast and furious, the smaller mechinoid fired concentrated bolts of electricity at X, who dodged, rolled and jumped over them as fast as he could.

One of the floor plates he stepped on while chasing Elec Man through a series of jumbled access pipes held a charge, and X yelped as he was hit with the blast of energy. His body spasmed with pain, but when he could move again, his internal systems reported only a three percent loss of life energy. Painful, but not powerful, he thought.

X charged his cannon to maximum power and fired through the piping and conduits between he and Elec Man. A crash resounded as Elec Man was struck, and through the hole he'd made, X could see the Robot Master getting groggily to his feet. A hole had opened in his upper left torso from the dissipated power of the Mega Buster Shot, but Elec Man quickly ducked out of sight.

The entire chamber filled with yellow light as Elec Man sent current through everything, X included. He began taking a little bit of damage, but found he could move. "Nice trick," he muttered. X worked his way around several switch boxes, and fired again at Elec Man's exposed side.

The Robot Master collapsed in a smoking heap. X closed his VR eyes, opening his real ones. He quickly exited the VR pod, calling up Elec Man's stored weapons system data. He ran a variation program, the plugged himself into the Weapon Selection Cycle Unit, updating his own parameters.

He smiled as he considered the possibilities of finding new skills from old wars.

Bang Hurricane stood atop the loading platform's outlook, watching the strange, misshapen vessel approach from several miles out. He pulled back from the scope and looked down to Scorcher and Keen Shotburst, standing well back from the platform's sloped ramp. "Something's not right about that ship, sir," he called down.

"Can you be more specific?"

"Hold on." Bang looked out at the vessel again. He could just make out a tarp-covered object in the center of the transport, taking up a great deal of space. A human deckhand walked around in front of it, and Bang could see from the comparative size that whatever was under the tarp, it was the size of a tank. The human's movements struck him as jerky, choppy, somehow unnatural. He looked back down at his comrades.

"I'm not sure," he called down. "Permission to scout them out, sir!"

"You're the only one here who can fly," Scorcher replied. "As such, permission granted!" Scorcher turned to Keen, who had opened up his right leg compartment and drawn out two sections of an energy sniper rifle. "What are you doing, Keen?"

"Watching his six," the big reploid replied. "This could be a trap." As Keen opened his left leg and pulled out the last part of the weapon, Scorcher powered up his Firebolt system. He wanted things to go quietly, but his idols had always urged caution. As Keen started sighting in with his scope, Scorch flinched at the sound of a distant flare going off.

He and Keen both let out a holler of dismay as the rockets obliterated Bang Hurricane from the sky.

"I can't believe I never thought to look for these kinds of programs in the archives," X said to himself. "This is incredible!"

"Enjoying yourself," asked a familiar voice nearby. X turned from the Selection Unit and saw Dr. Veris leaning against the doorframe of the VR room.

"Hey, Dr. Veris," X said with a grin. "For the first time in a while, yes, I am. Granted, it's just VR, but the chance to study the old Wily robots in action is something I should have taken advantage of sooner."

"Well, hindsight is 20/20," Veris said, stepping into the room. His clothes hung loosely off of his frame, bags pouched under his eyes. X got up out of the seat at the unit, took a step towards the human.

"Are you all right, Dr. Veris?"

"Hmm?" He blinked rapidly, stood straighter. "Ah, yes, sorry. Your friend, Detective Marlow, has had me doing a lot of research work for his department, cross-referencing reploid and bot attacks on humans over the last forty years." Veris adjusted his glasses sleepily. "You'd be surprised by the number of occurences."

"Not really," X said. "Then again, I haven't been active that whole time. Reploids were largely based on my design, even though I hadn't even been awakened yet."

"Yes, I've always found that curious," said Veris. He ambled over to an empty wheeled chair, hunkering down heavily on it. "You're technically the first reploid."

"Technically, yes. I was the first one to have completely free will, though, no hardwired code to go against my spark's nature. The first reploids based on my design were something of a nightmare, if I'm not mistaken."

"Oh yeah," Veris said, chuckling darkly. "They got made by every military in the world, sent off to fight and kill for glory and country. The battery life on those first units was minimal, thankfully. The second batch came directly from Dr. Cain's labs. He built them just as Light designed you to be, with free will. He was my mentor, you know."

X shook his head. Dr. Cain. The old man had been dead for a little over a year now. It seemed X was very much alone now, except for Zero, and the golden-haired swordsman was off on the moon doing Light knew what. X looked again to Veris.

"So, what brought you here to begin with?"

"Ah, yes," said the human, leaning forward and producing a datapad. "While doing that research for Marlow, I came across these old accounts. It seems that a few of Wily's Robot Masters had a special hatred for humans, went out of their way to kill as many as they could. A lot of the attacks in the last forty years or so have been by robots built largely upon Wily's designs."

X scanned through the documentation, and could see where Veris was coming from. He could identify, in most cases, which of the old Wily designs had been altered or upgraded. He didn't think it could be chalked up to mere coincidence. He looked over to Veris, who was looking off sleepily to one side. "Do you think some of the old Wily drone robots are reactivating?"

"It would explain all of the activity in the restricted zones," Veris said. "We've got power and gas and water lines that go under a few of those places, after all. A surge or movement could cause these old transports to activate, relying on dormant but still powered programming."

"That might explain the attacks, then. Something from the old Skull Man zone could have come south to the city, several somethings. They could be old elite drones that never saw combat against the original Megaman, fell back on old programming."

"They'd have to be close to the level of sophistication of the old Robot Masters," Veris said. "You know, the archives have passages about secondary clone units of them in several Wily campaigns. Could be he had a few backups or whole units that never got activated." The human and reploid considered the possibility, and they agreed that the theory fit.

Veris left after assuring X that he would bring the theory to Marlow's attention. When he was gone, X turned again to the VR pod. He decided a couple more run-throughs couldn't hurt.

Keen lined up his scope on one of the humans holding a smoking rocket launcher, his augmented scanners feeding him information that made no sense. According to his sensors, there was only one living bio-signature aboard the vessel, somewhere under that huge tarp. Yet he could see the two armed humans clearly as the ship continued on its measured approach. It was a little over a mile out and closing. He had a clean shot.

"Permission to fire on human target," he rumbled at Scorcher.

"Permission granted," Scorcher barked, readying his longest-range attack. He would have to wait until the transport vessel was within half a mile of the landing slope, but the moment he was in range, he would let loose. Human or no, he would not tolerate such a brazen assault on his men, or his assigned territory.

Keen squeezed the trigger, and the energy bullet flew true. Yet when it struck, he didn't just see blood, bone and brain fly from the shattered head of his target; he also saw metal, circuitry and scraps of wire scatter.

"Sir, they're some kind of cybernetic hybrid," he called out, aiming in on the other humanoid. The second target was quickly loading another rocket into its weapon, turning toward the loading dock.

"Weapons free," Scorcher barked as the vessel passed the one-mile mark. "We bring these fuckers down before they reach shore!" Keen fired again, just as another rocket released. He and Scorcher dove for cover, the rocket missing his commanding officer's legs by mere inches.

The back of the arched landing pod exploded in a hailstorm of flames and debris, peppering them both with burned shrapnel. Scorcher got to one knee, and saw that the vessel had increased speed. It was almost in range. The moment his weapons' targeting system declared a lock, he thrust his right arm out and fired an orb of blue flame in an arc at the ship.

The shot landed with a crash mere yards from the tarp in the middle of the ship, and he and Keen watched the vessel bob violently to one side, lurching towards capsizing. The tarp caught afire, and Scorcher let out a triumphant holler. "Take that you bastards," he shouted, preparing a second salvo.

As he powered up the shot, Scorcher saw a humanoid dash into view long enough to start dragging the large, flaming tarp off of whatever it had been covering. Keen tried to line up a shot, but the humanoid seemed to have no concern for its own safety. Running full speed, the tarp wrapping and billowing about it, the man-thing plunged clear over the side of the ship with the tarp trailing after.

Keen and Scorcher found themselves looking at some kind of land assault vehicle, a strange tank-like vehicle of multi-colored armor plating and bristling weaponry jutting out like porcupine needles. A barely visible pilot's visor sat just behind a tank cannon, which rotated on creaking gears to aim directly at them.

"Oh, shit," Scorcher muttered. The cannon roared, and a second later the Zippo-shaped reploid was being carried back towards the rubble from the rocket fired at them on a ballistic shell. The round exploded when he crashed with it into the wreckage, tearing into his grade-2 transteel chassis.

The explosion hadn't killed him, but Scorcher could feel major and minor systems going berserk throughout his body. His life force tank wavered at ten percent, his primary weapon was offline and undetected, and his emergency evasion thrusters had been damaged beyond use. As he groaned, rising out of another pile of rubble, he saw his right arm lying a few feet away, the fingers twitching uselessly. Black fluid poured from his shoulder, lubricator fluid streaming out in a spray.

He managed to look up in time to see Keen loose every weapon he had at the tank as it rolled up onto the lip of the loading dock. The energy shots flickered as they met the resistance of a kinetic shield, and his standard heavy-duty bullets pinged off of the armor plating without effect. As Keen started to dash toward the onrushing tank, a long, thin armature snapped out to the side from it, a flat, serrated saw blade whirring to rapid life.

When Keen closed on the tank, the armature snapped forward, tearing neatly into Keen's midsection. The bulky reploid screamed, bucking and thrashing as he tried feebly to reach down to the swinging steel arm, to try and slow the chewing advance of the saw blade. It was a wasted effort, however. In ten seconds, the saw arm finished its sweep, cutting Keen Shotburst in half.

Keen whimpered pathetically as his upper body toppled to the ground, sparks and oils sloshing to the ground. His stalwart legs took two mindless steps forward before falling over. Scorcher cried out, but before he could do anything more, six of the porcupine needles flashed toward him. They were, in fact, repeater cannons, much like the Maverick Vile had used.

When they stopped belching death, Scorcher looked like a piece of metallic Swiss cheese.

Chapter 8

Sweet Release

X was about to finish his fourth battle with an old Robot Master in the VR when he came out of the simulator with a jolt. His emergency comm station in the VR chamber was blaring like a klaxon.

Launching himself out of the VR pod, X stood over the commlink panel and connected. On screen, a lizard-like silver reploid stood clenching his teeth in a compact command room. "Commander X! We have a situation!"

"Where," X asked.

"New York City," the other bot, lieutenant Silvertongue, barked quickly. "We picked it up on our human comm intercepts. There's some kind of assault vehicle wreaking havok out there. I tried to get a hold of Scorcher, he's in charge of two other Hunters there, but he and his men aren't responding!"

"Did you try a direct linkjack?"

"We did. All indications are that the three of them are incapable of responding," Silvertongue replied. "Sir, my team is off shore recovering three Coast Guard ships that disappeared two hours ago. I'm the only one here in Jersey right now! I need backup!"

"Stay right where you are, lieutenant," X snapped. "I'm coming!" X raced from the VR chamber in HQ's first floor to the main transporter room, a vaulted room in the bowels of the complex. One of the technicians, a small, wiry man-like reploid named Hoffer looked up from his controls as X burst in.

"C-commander," he stammered. "Where are you going?"

"New York City," X said, stepping up onto the transporter pad. "Get me as close to the hangar our men were using as their operations center as you can." Hoffer nodded, checking through a list of coordinates in New York.

"Got it," he said after a few moments. "Right on top of a shipping dock. Do you want a vis-rep first?"

"Display on screen three." Hoffer punched up several commands, and a nearby monitor sprang to life. The scene was a bird's eye view of the loading dock, which looked now like the ruins of a battlefield. Fires raged unchecked, and bodies, both human and mechinoid, were scattered everywhere. Blood and pulverized organs, oils and machine fluids, stained the concrete red and black.

X only gave Hoffer a nod, and ten seconds later, he flashed out of existence.

X rematerialized just outside of the loading bay where the Man Drone had come ashore, the reek of oil and smoke forcing him to shut off his olfactory receptors. X quickly picked his way through the rubble, finding the lifeless bodies of Scorcher and Keen Shotburst. There was no sign of Bang Hurricane.

Something pelted into his back plate, three somethings. Bullets, X thought as he wheeled around. What he saw before him defied good sense. A human stood thirty yards away, legs apart, an ancient machine rifle clutched in his hands. He was wearing the tattered remains of a military uniform, and his head lay cocked to one side, lying obscenely on one shoulder.

There was no bio-life signature coming from the human. There were, X noticed, numerous mechanical signals coming off of him, though. X used his onboard magnifiers, looking into the human's eyes; there appeared to be a faint red electronic glow behind them. The eyes themselves were hollow, colored glass. Traces of the original eye tissue could still be seen, though barely.

This wasn't a human being; this was a corpse filled with machinery. As X fired three rapid shots from his Buster Cannon, punching holes through the dessicated meat, he could see thin wires and bands of steel falling apart, the supports fold up as the construct fell over in a heap.

X walked slowly over to the corpse. He rolled it over roughly with a flick of his foot, struggling not to cry out at what he saw. This human had likely been dead already when the back of his skull had been pried open, the brain removed and the electronic circuits and small, simple control box implanted. Thin transteel struts and copper wire had been used to move the corpse like a puppet.

"It's an abomination," he rasped. No sooner had he said this than he heard sirens in the middle distance, followed by more machine gun fire, and the roar of a tank cannon. Something exploded northwest of his position. X dashed toward the sound of screams and battle.

The loading dock he'd arrived at was bordered by a long row of open-fronted warehouses, and scores of panicked humans came surging through them, fleeing the carnage. X pressed toward them, intent on questioning someone, anyone, who looked even remotely in control of their emotions. As he neared the closest warehouse, one such human, wearing an NYPD uniform and clutching a bleeding hole in his right shoulder, came directly toward him through another wave of civilians.

"You're X," the officer shouted above the screaming, gibbering throng.

"I am. What's happening? Where is it?"

"Back there, on 6th Street," the cop grunted, coming to a stop directly in front of X, who towered over him. "My whole precinct just about got wasted! That thing is a nasty piece of hardware, and those soldiers? They ain't human!"

"I'm aware of that," X said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. "I've already met one."

"Aren't there three more of you around? I know I've seen them out here on my patrols."

"Dead," X said heavily. "Caught offguard. I'll handle this situation. You need to get medical attention." X swept around the man and headed off for the enemy.

The first alley he could fit down between warehouses stood echoing before him, his heavy metal feet crunching already-broken pavement as he ran. The sounds of fighting escalated. He recognized the audio signature of a soldier bot's energy rifle, followed by staccato beats of a chaingun. It sounded like the cannon Vile used to keep mounted to his shoulder all those years ago.

As X came out onto 4th Street, he could see a path of destruction left in the wake of the tank. People had been shot, burned, and cut apart all up and down the street. He tried to keep his composure at the sight of a blood-blackened stuffed dog lying in the street.

Rage coursed through his circuitry. Whatever Maverick was piloting the tank, causing this carnage, he would do to them what the original Megaman had done to Skull Man. He would rip their head off with his bare hands.

X caught sight of a billowing cloud of smoke between buildings as he pressed forward. Another crack of a cannon shot roared, followed by the smash of glass and ignition of fire from an explosion. Looking up and to the right, he could see an apartment building leaning at a crazed angle from midway up. As he watched, the upper half sheared away, plummeting out of sight behind the buildings on 4th Street.

More casualties, more innocent lives lost. X ran as fast as he could, barreling into another alley. In another fifty yards, he would come out on 6th Street, hopefully in time to catch the tank before it caused any more damage.

As he came within twenty yards of the alley mouth, his path was blocked by a surge of escaping New Yorkers, all wide-eyed and mewling like terrified animals. X tried to turn sideways to move through them, but his large frame only made them all push and jostle harder. He looked over their heads, and saw two more of the human-machine soldiers step into the mouth of the alley, weapons raised. The left one held an old M-16 rifle, the right one, a flamethrower.

"Get d-," he managed before the warning became useless. Bullets sprayed, joined with a writhing serpent of fire. The packed-in bodies between the soldiers and X shrieked, cursed, hollered to a God X did not believe in as they were torn apart or set ablaze, their faces dripping as their flesh melted right before his eyes.

A three-round burst of bullets thudded ineffectively against his chest plate. The nearest flaming victim tried to hold himself up against X's side, clawing for help, sliding off from bloody skin peeling away from his fingertips. Stripes ran down X's side and legs. The Maverick Hunter charged, then leveled his cannon over the heads of the humans who knelt or lay sprawled in their dying, and fired a single Mega Buster Shot.

The hybrid soldiers flew apart. Like the first one, they'd carried no bio-life signatures. He strode stiff-legged through the muck of human corpses, trying to avoid stepping on them, but in the end he had no choice.

As X walked out onto the sidewalk of 6th Street, he saw the tank-like vehicle down the street to the left. Two thick clamping armatures were extended from its sides, one holding up a crumpled police car, the other smashing a helpless heavyset man against the pavement over and over again. X could see the pulverized legs flopping as the man was lifted up again, wailing like banshee. The human was as good as dead.

X fired a single standard shot at the tank, which he could see was covered with blood. A kinetic shield glimmered blue as the shot connected, but light scorching appeared on the bloody armor plating. The turret began to turn toward him then, the clamp arms hurling the squad car and maimed human both through the windows of a flanking office building.

The edge of a pilot window came into view, and X's scanners detected both a mechinoid signature and a human bio-signature inside of the assault vehicle. The window was almost opaque, obscuring his view of the pilot. Did the Maverick inside have a hostage? A prisoner? He didn't know, but after so many humans had already been killed, he knew he had to try and find out. If the human inside were a victim, at least he could save them.

The turret finished its rotation, now turned toward X. The Maverick Hunter activated one of his eight auxiliary weapons programs; an invisible bubble surrounded him, a defensive barrier that would reflect projectile weapons back to their source. Using his auxiliary power battery to maintain the shield, X then loaded what he'd dubbed his Spark Gap Attack.

As he tensed, ready for the inevitable attack, speakers crackled to life from the tank. "Ah, X. So good of you to join us," said a smooth, cultured voice over the speakers. X's audio receptors analyzed the voice, and identified it only as a mechinoid, sub-type unknown. "What do you think of my Man Drone? Quite an efficient killing machine, isn't it?"

"Name yourself, Maverick," X shouted. The unseen enemy chortled derisively in response.

"Maverick? Oh, my dear boy, I'm no Maverick. They lack imagination, unlike I. No, I am not a foe so easily classified, X. Much like you, I am different, a step above the rest. My friends can attest to that."

"Wow, a sociopath with friends," X taunted. "Call the folks at Guiness."

"How droll," the unseen man replied, unimpressed. "I, am Hephaestus. You will need not bother wondering why all of this is happening, X. You will be dead long before you can even begin to grasp my designs."

"Sigma used to say that sort of thing a lot too. Are you one of his cronies?"

"Hardly. Sigma was good, X. I watched him over the years, and he got better with every campaign. But even he was a limited thing. His potential was blocked by the same limitations every reploid encounters. And you, too, have reached your peak, X. Your days are numbered. Now, if you'll just cooperate with us, we can make that brief time left to you mercifully quick and painless."

The speakers cut off, and X braced for impact. The earth-shaking crack and boom of the cannon thundered, the shell crashing into the reflective barrier. The bubble flashed on impact, and the shell launched back at the tank. The resultant explosion did little damage to the armor, but blew several of the weapons mounted to the exterior off, clattering to the ground.

X aimed him Buster Cannon at the ground and fired the Spark Gap. Electricity pounded through the ground everywhere except under his feet, yellow energy corruscating over the tank. The sound of a human scream, coming from within the tank, forced X to cease the assault.

The tank, however, emitted chattering sounds as it tried to move. Temporarily inert, X thought. Now's my chance! X sprinted forward, and one of the armatures on the tank's left side took a single move from its flank, jerking inneffectively to a stop. X saw an enormous circular saw blade pop out in place of the claw pinchers, but the steel rods were locked down, shorted out by the Spark Gap Attack.

Jumping up on the vehicle, X grinned as several aged rifles crumpled under his feet upon landing. He let his left hand reappear from his cannon port, stepping onto the narrow platform atop the turret. Reaching down, he pounded his fingers into the thinner metal around the access door, and with a grunt and shriek of metal, tore it off. He tossed it aside and dropped down into the pilot box.

The pilot spun around in his seat. If X could have thrown up, he would have. As it was, he stared in horror at the creature in front of him. Tubes and wires ran in and out of the heavyset human before him, the flesh showing signs of infection, a purposeful carelessness evident in the implementation of the mechanical augementations. A squat black metal box with a blinking red light sat on the left side of his neck, a three-tipped clamp piercing the skin and muscle, attached to his spine. The man's left eye twitched and oozed a thick yellow pus, and the mouth and cheek on that side were unnaturally pulled up in a sneer.

Attached to his left arm was a short-barreled weapon. The man opened his mouth, and with a tremulous voice he croaked, "Kill, me." X took an involuntary step backward, and the man's weaponized arm rose. "Please! I can't control myself! Kill me!"

The weapon discharged, two high-velocity rounds punching into X's lower torso. He crashed backward, shocked that the rounds had managed to blow a thumb-sized hole in his armor plating. At point-blank range, even the older weapon had enough power to pass through his shield and a little of his armor. Again the human groaned, rising up out of his chair. "Kill, me!"

X, sitting against the back wall of the pilot box, obliged him. He raised the left arm, cannon port open, and fired a single shot, blowing the man's head into a fine red mist.

Darkness swarmed over X's mind then, and the legendrary Maverick Hunter passed out.

It has been said that it is always darkest before the dawn. Titan didn't necessarily think this was so. As he peered around the corner, long-range scanners detecting the killing blow to the Man Drone's enslaved pilot, he thought things were actually looking quite bright.

X's power signature had begun to waver, giving Titan a sense of urgency. If he struck now, hard and fast, he might succeed in destroying X early on in the running. However, Orbous had just contacted him when X was prying the top off of the Man Drone to tell him that several more Hunters were on the way from Central City. The master, Hephaestus, wanted to let Titan decide for himself what to do now.

It was an utterly confusing idea for the giant mechinoid. He'd always followed orders, done what he was told to do. Being granted the choice of what he wanted to do on his own had, until then, been a largely foreign concept. At least, he thought, I know what I want to do.

"Get in one good hit," he muttered, stepping out of the alley near the Man Drone and picking up a battered, bullet-riddled pickup truck, hoisting it over his head. Titan carried it over to the Man Drone, and with a heave, he brought the truck crashing down atop the tank.

This was not the one good hit, no. That came as Titan loaded one of his concussion bombs into the crumpled front seat of the truck, directly over the torn pilot hatch, and set the timer. The hulking mechinoid then lumbered away, activating his teleport return device. When he winked out of New York City, the countdown on the bomb began.

Back at the lair of Hephaestus and his allies, Paladin sat on his throne-like chair, watching on a monitor the replay of the mangled human pilot, taken from a hidden camera inside of the Man Drone.

"Kill, me," the enslaved human begged. Paladin hung his head, and were he able to, he would have wept.

Chapter 9

Damages

Lieutenant Silvertongue barked at his three men to get over to the tank and pry the pickup truck off, so that they could get commander X out of there. The reptilian reploid didn't think anything was off until his first man turned about and shouted for the other two to turn back.

The concussion bomb erupted when the lead man was only ten yards away. The blast hurled the pickup truck at a downward angle, crushing the poor soldier and knocking the other two flat when it skidded into them. Silvertongue managed to avoid being hit only by a few feet as the wrecked truck dragged to a halt.

The first reploid, crushed by the truck, was badly damaged but alive when Silvertongue reached him. The lieutenant had a medical bot begin analysis and recovery right away as he carefully approached the tank. Climbing up on top, he looked down inside, and found X and the dead humanoid lying flat on the floor.

The concussion bomb had been rigged to concentrate most of its force directly down into the assault vehicle. The human was a pulpy mess of blood and pulverized bones and meat. X, meanwhile, had a large dent in his abdomen, along with a small blast hole. Intermittent sparks escaped the hole; he had minor internal damages.

"An easy repair," Silvertongue breathed, relieved. He hopped down inside, picked up X over his shoulder, and jumped out. Several maintenance bots stood near the tank with a field repair truck open and waiting.

Silvertongue put the commander on the empty bed and waited. X was still unconscious, likely from the blast, he surmised. On the other repair bed, his sergeant was groaning as the floating medical bot pulled off his crushed chest plate. Two large red boxes underneath had been punctured by the bent plate, sparks spitting from one, green fluid from the other.

"Main life tank and lubricator oil tanks have both been moderately compromised," the medical bot droned. "Temporary repairs can be effected. Capacity loss for both will be approximately seventeen percent. This level of operational capacity requires authorization from a Hunter ranked first sergeant or greater."

"Do it," Silvertongue snarled.

"Authorization confirmed by lieutenant Silvertongue, Hoboken New Jersey field officer, Operations Division," the bot droned, setting to work. Silvertongue turned around to find the other two man-like bots finishing the patch on X's armor.

"Is he already fixed?"

"Internal damages were minimal," one of the bots reported. "The plating was still present, bent back from weapons fire. The bullet fragments have been removed. We cannot ascertain the cause of the commander's unconscious state."

"So the bomb blast, it didn't do any real damage?"

"Cosmetic only, aside from a minor loss of auxiliary power supply," the bot said. "We will now begin tending to other nearby injured robots and reploids." The two man-like bots hopped out of the truck, their tool kits in hand. Silvertongue stared down at the commander, silently willing him to wake up.

The news crews were on their way, and the lieutenant didn't want to have to deal with them alone, especially since he knew so little about what had happened here.

Somewhere in the darkness, X heard the clamp-stomp of metal feet running away from him. Where am I, he thought. Who's out there? Wait, come back! Tell me what's going on!

X tried to speak, but found he couldn't. When he tried to bring up an internal diagnostic, nothing happened. He was alone, blind, the only sound around that of someone or something moving away from him.

X reached out with his hand, but found he couldn't feel the weight of either the hand itself or the attached arm. He felt nothing, weightless nothingness, all around his mind. Then, after an interminable amount of time passed, he saw a distant figure approaching.

It was Megaman. His predecessor, there in all of his blue glory, approached through the void of space, his steps measured and certain. "Megaman? Is that you?" X's voice sounded hollow to his own ears, dried out.

"You can call me Rock," the original Blue Bomber said, coming to a halt what looked like a few yards away. X tried to move his eyes, found he couldn't and tried instead to access his systems again. Nothing. "You have questions." Not an inquiry, X noted, but an assured declaration.

"Yes, I have questions. Am I dead? Did I get killed?"

"No," said Rock easily. "I can tell you that you're very much alive. Dormant, but alive."

"Okay. I don't understand what's happening here. Where am I?" Rock looked around, smiling his ever-present smile.

"You're here."

"Yes, but where is 'here', Rock?"

"Nowhere, everywhere, and all the places in between," Rock replied merrily. "You should see yourself." X's visual perspective jittered, blanked out, and then resettled. He stood now next to Rock, and found himself looking at his own body. Arms dangling out to the sides, X's body hung lashed by frayed wires to a withered tree. The synthskin around his mouth and lower jaw had been torn away, revealing the glistening ceramic teeth and skull-line plating design beneath. The optics were darkened orbs, staring sightless at the ground.

"Mind you, this is just a manifestation, but it's how you feel," Rock said. X turned, still feeling weightless. Rock didn't look to be in the best of shape, either. His blue armor was battered, dented and ashen, as though he'd walked through a flaming building that had toppled on him.

"What's going on here?"

"You're a spark right now, X. A spark without a body, like me. You're still in your chassis, yes, but not really connected."

"I don't understand."

"I know you don't," Rock said, his eyes shining with tears. "You might, some day. I really hope it doesn't happen to you like it did to me." Rock covered his face with his hands, sniffed hard, and shook his head roughly. He looked up at the hanging body of X again, steadied now. "X, you had no choice, you know. You never did." X looked toward his battered body silently. "The human, what was done to him, it was horrid."

"How do you know about that?"

"I accessed a camera unit inside of the cockpit of the assault vehicle. I tried to ride the signal back to its receiving end, but got blocked out. You may feel like a monster, but you're not. That man was already as good as dead."

X thought about this a moment. Then he said quietly, "You're right. I know that. I just can't shake the guilt."

"That's what sets you apart from whoever your enemy is. He doesn't feel any guilt. It's like he was built to do this sort of thing. Whoever he is, X, he's far worse than Sigma, because Sigma was just evil. Whoever did this," Rock said, trembling. "They're more than evil. They're insane."

X's vision began dimming once again, and with a start, he realized that he could hear voices around him again. Megaman X woke up, looking at the roof of a reploid maintenance truck.

Three hours later, X sat in his office in Hunter HQ, reading the earliest estimate reports. Between soldier bots, six police cruisers, the buildings destroyed and the municipal damages, the current estimated total cost of the confrontation was fifteen million dollars. X didn't worry so much about that, as the second set of figures.

Four-hundred and seventy-six humans, dead. Sixty-two wounded and in critical condition. Twenty-six wounded but listed in fair condition. Forty-three people missing who had last been seen in the area. Fifty-four law enforcement and soldier-class bots destroyed. Three Hunters, dead. Bang Hurricane's remains had been found at the bottom of the water just off-shore. The missing Coast Guard vessels had been recovered, but all of the servicemen, save three, had managed to escape their sinking vessels when the mechinoids had attacked.

The transport ship that had brought the assault vehicle ashore had been a decommissioned Coast Guard vessel, and the communique to Scorcher and his two men had been a decoy sent to keep them off of their guard.

X weighed all of the data he had on hand, part of his mind still clinging to the vision he'd experienced while blacked out. "Damages are more than facts and figures," he muttered to the empty room. "Much more."

Chapter 10

Divided We Fall

Paladin could hardly believe what he was hearing, but Hephaestus had made himself quite clear. The enigmatic mechinoid now had the measure of the Hunters Organization, and the results emboldened him.

Titan had already departed, accompanied by a full detachment of Caretaker's 'toy soldiers', thirty deceased humans linked now to Titan's communications system. They would arrive in Minneapolis's downtown area, dropping from above into the heart of the newly remodeled Target Field in the middle of a baseball game.

Minnesota was home to a full compliment of Hunters, five Class C Hunters commanded by a lone Class B Hunter by the name of Aquanis. Their operations center was directy down the street from the stadium; Titan would face them down before all of the humans could be killed.

Paladin had known that this assault was in the master's plan, but originally, Shinobi was going to accompany Titan and keep hidden, ambushing the Hunters when they showed up to take on Titan and the soldiers. Hephaestus no longer felt Shinobi was necessary.

Despite the master's assurances, Paladin feared the were sending Titan to his death. He wasn't alone in this thought, either. He sat across the table from Orbous in the war room, both mechinoids lost in thought.

"X will now be ready for another attack," Orbous hissed. "It is too soon. The master should abort this mission."

"I agree, but we both now know he will not," Paladin replied. "He is confident in Titan's skill."

"Shinobi's part in the plan was logical, perfect in fact. It played to his skills. Now where has the master sent him?"

"With Poseidon, to one of the old Wily compounds," Paladin said. "He said there was a capsule there that he wanted to recover." Orbous tapped the table impatiently. "Any word from Titan?"

"He's maintaining comms silence," Orbous groused. "Not wise at all. I have no eyes onboard, so I have no idea how far away they are yet." Paladin rose, pacing the room's length. "Then again, with heightened security around the major metropolitan areas, perhaps the silence is best for now."

Paladin continued pacing up and down the room. "Something is wrong here. The master would not change his plans on a mere whim. There must be something very special about that pod they're after. I wish the master had told me more about it." Orbous grunted, pushing a small button on the table. A panel slid open in front of him, and a holographic display lit up before him as he typed away at the unveiled keyboard in the tabletop.

"Do you remember which compound it was?"

"The fifth one," Paladin said. "If you find anything of interest, contact me." Orbous just grunted again, his attention fixed on the computer now. Paladin strode out of the war room, into the silent antechamber.

He found himself wondering if all of his new master's plans might be as doomed as the exploits of his creator, Dr. Wily.

The bomb bay doors began to open on their hydraulic arms, the riptide of cool air rushing in over Titan. His mind was clear as he surveyed the zombie-like troopers Caretaker had crafted. Unlike his ally Paladin, Titan had no qualms with humans being used in such a fashion. They were already dead, and if they hadn't been, who cared? Humans were weak, pathetic things, after all.

There had only ever been three humans whom Titan respected; Dr. Light, Dr. Wily, and Rock, known better as Megaman. Titan knew what had happened to that young man, though, and he actually felt a small amount of pity for Rock. He'd been a boy in a metal suit once, nothing more. By the time the Wily campaigns were over, Rock was more machine than human.

A timer went off in Titan's head, and he stomped up to the edge of the bay doors. "Ten seconds," he said aloud, counting down in his head. Savage glee and anticipation coursed through his system. When he reached the end of his countdown, he launched himself out, the troopers following right behind.

A symphony of destruction was about to begin.

See this now, friends, and see it well. Shy not away, for though what you are about to witness is obscene, it is necessary. See Shinobi cleave an armed human guard's head in half, one of his vibro-knives slicing clean through the top of the head and out of the neck, the face sliding wetly off as the body catches up a moment later, slumping forward. Listen to the splatter as Poseidon's fist barrels out through the other human's stomach, having worked a course through his back, intestines flopping to the ground. The last word this man speaks is the name of his only child.

See them very well.

Watch as the ninja mechinoid throws a set of keys, pilfered from his victim's pocket, to his larger comrade. There will be no more death here this afternoon, as these ruins have long ago been declared without value. Take what measure of comfort you can knowing that the victims here number only two.

Poseidon uses one of the keys on a nearby console to deactivate the force dome barring their entry into the ruins of Wily's fifth compound. The ancient engines powering the dome will never kick on again.

The mechinoid servants of Hephaestus stalk through the wreckage. They move swiftly, locating the capsule in less than thirty minutes. It is a curious thing, this pod. There's room enough for a reploid inside, but the only thing visible through the translucent green glass is a mechanical arm.

Both mechinoids are familiar with the arm, and they flinch at the sight of it. They each grab an end of the capsule, and carry it back to the featureless black van they arrived in. Setting it in the back, they then clamber up into the cab of the vehicle, driving slowly to the hidden transporter pad they arrived at when coming to the island.

In a flash of light, they are gone. The corpses they left in their wake will not be discovered for three days.

When the emegency comms line started to chime, X clicked a button and immediately brought the link online. "X here," he said quickly. The reploid facing him was a tiger-like man, his blue optics flashing.

"Major Trislash, Minneapolis Center, Midwest Ops," the other officer replied. He was calm, collected, a veteran of the Hunters Organization. "We have Maverick activity, Target Field. I've sent three of my men. The other two and myself will join them shortly."

"Visual feeds?"

"I have two running. There's one enormous bot commanding drones like the ones in your all-points report from New York City. Full-scale assault. One of my men just went down under the big man's fists. Sir, he really does look like a serious customer. I believe we can handle him, though."

"Negative," X barked at the major. "You will not engage! I'm coming to you now! Be ready for me in two minutes with your other officers."

Less than a minute later, X rushed into the main transport chamber, rattling off his desired coordinates. The pad energized, hurling him in the blink of an eye halfway across the country to downtown Minneapolis. As he rematerialized, he found himself looking at major Triclaw, who had donned his exo-chassis armor and a gatling laser to attach to one of the shoulder brackets.

A veteran who knows how to prepare himself, X thought. Thank Light! "Sit-rep," X said, letting Triclaw lead the way towards the entrance of the operations building.

"Most of the humans are dead or escaped, but the big man is holding about fifty people hostage, demanding X be brought to him."

"Hostages? That's unusual."

"I think Skyblaze managed to wound this guy before he was slagged, put a crimp in his plans. Most of the drones are down, too. Sir, if all four of us storm the stadium, this guy won't stand a chance."

"Neither will the hostages."

"Acceptable losses," Triclaw said flatly. X grabbed the slightly larger reploid by the shoulder, spun him around, and punched him square in the side of the face. Triclaw went down in a heap, his two subordinates training their own wrist cannons on X as he took a ready stance. Triclaw held up a hand to his men, who lowered their weapons slowly. "I deserved that," Triclaw said, rubbing his face as he stood. "I apologize, commander. I shouldn't let myself think like that."

"You're damned right you shouldn't," X shouted. "The next time I hear or see you blatantly disregard human safety, I'll have you discharged from the Hunters and branded a Maverick! Am I understood?!"

"Yes, sir," Triclaw and his two men said in unison. Triclaw started to walk alongside X again, heading for the exit. "The big man calls himself Titan. The last thing we got from my live feed before he destroyed it was him saying 'Tell X to come to Titan, to meet his doom'. Whoever he is, he's not in any of the database archives we've got access to."

"Possibly a Sigma loyalist we missed before," X said, pushing open the doors leading to the street. The nearby roads had already been cordoned off by human police, a good sign. The people of Minneapolis seemed to have their act together. "Give me a display of the video."

Triclaw's left optic flashed orange, projecting a recorded segment of the live feed he'd watched minutes earlier. In the middle of the ravaged field towered a huge yellow and black mechinoid, modeled after a giant of Greek mythos. The name certainly made sense. The bot lobbed grenades from a wrist-mounted cannon and hurled slabs of earth and stones to kill stragglers. X watched him scoop up one of Triclaw's men and rip the reploid apart with his bare hands.

From above, a winged Hunter, the phoenix-like Skyblaze, tore down into Titan, blasting the giant with several Hellfire missiles before peppering him with small arms bullets from a rifle mounted on his back. Swooping down, Skyblaze got too close, and Titan punched his fist through Skyblaze's chest, tearing out all manner of circuits, wires and his main life tank.

After that, though, Titan's other arm hung dead at his side. X could just make out a ragged gap in Titan's left shoulder on the video playback. "End the feed," he ordered. Triclaw took a step back, standing at the ready. "Okay, here's how we're going to play this," he said quietly.

Titan tried once again to lift his left arm, and was rewarded with a twitch in one finger and sparks belching out of the wound. The miserable bird had landed a solid salvo, wounding Titan before he could even square off against X. This mission had already taken a step in the wrong direction. What was worse, when he tried to activate the single-unit teleporter device he'd been given by master Hephaestus, he discovered that one of the bird's bullets had hit it, rendering his escape impossible. Titan would have to fight his way clear of Minneapolis, or highjack the nearest available teleporter down the street at the local Hunter Operations Center.

The confidence he'd felt when dropping from the plane had taken a huge hit. He wasn't sure now whether or not he really wanted to fight X. A voice coming from a megaphone behind him drew Titan around. "Titan," the voice called. The huge mechinoid used his optic scan, and found himself looking at a bulky, tiger-man reploid decked out in a crimson transteel hauberk, a gatling laser mounted to the shoulder. His right hand held a megaphone at his side, long gleaming claws jutting from the fingertips of his left hand. Flanking him were two more Hunters, both reminiscent of images Titan had seen of Drill Man, one orange and the other a mix of black and red.

"Where is X," Titan bellowed, the human hostages cowering behind him, backed by the four remaining drone soldiers.

"A message has been sent to him," the tiger-man replied through the megaphone. "He will come if you let the hostages go."

"I refuse," Titan barked back immediately. His left shoulder sparked again, to his dismay. My bargaining position is not so good right now, he thought. "X comes, or they all die!"

"If you want a fight, I'll take you on," the reploid called, shushing his subordinates as they began to object. Titan felt something stir in his mind. This reploid was wearing exo-armor; did that mean the Hunter was afraid? Perhaps Titan could handle this one without trouble. Perhaps this is all that remains, he thought. I might have already slain the best their ops center here had!

Confidence renewed, Titan took a lumbering step toward the armored reploid. "Very well then, little man! Let's see what you're made of!"

X had hoped this gamble would pay off, and thus far, it had. The Tunnel Brothers, the pair of Hunters who had remained with Triclaw at the ops center for X's arrival, had even added in their own tweak to the plan, which they took to as soon as Triclaw shushed them.

They had fallen back into the shadows of a dugout as soon as they'd played their part. Using their programmed abilities, both Hunters plowed through the dugout wall with the drills on their heads, burrowing under the field. When they were behind the humans and drones, they would quietly unearth themselves and lead the humans away.

X waited with his cannon set to sniper mode, one eye trained on a locked target, the other on Triclaw and Titan. Situated behind the scoreboard, he was hidden perfectly. As soon as Titan swung a wild haymaker punch that Triclaw jumped over, X fired at the first drone.

It went down like a sack of hammers. On the field, Triclaw was backing away and firing his gatling laser at Titan. A translucent energy shield flickered around the bigger bot as it kicked out at Triclaw, who moved much too fast to be caught by the attack.

X quickly dispatched the other three drones with small sniper shots, making his way quickly down off of the scoreboard, into the seats. Racing down the steps leading to the edge of the field, he saw that a few humans had noticed the dead drones, and they were spreading the word quietly to the others.

By the time X got down onto the field proper, Titan had managed to land a solid punch to Triclaw, who was thrown back by the blow. His exo-armor was cracked from the lone strike, but the tiger-like reploid was instantly back on his feet.

X saw the ground behind the humans tumble open, the Tunnel Brothers quickly and quietly leading them away from the pitched battle. X ran toward them, charging his Mega Buster Cannon.

A mistake.

The energy output fluctuations from his charging cannon caught the attention of the giant mechinoid, who bellowed with rage as the humans followed the Tunnel Brothers out of the stadium. Behind Titan, Triclaw took the distraction and buried his claws several inches into Titan's thick armor chassis. Titan looked down at Triclaw and grabbed him by the leg, crushing it into a metal lump. Triclaw hollered, and a moment later was thrown into a low wall of the field, his claws bent from being dislodged so hastily.

X took aim at Titan from twenty yards away, his targeting system locking on as the giant stampeded towards him. He fired the charged shot. In a flash the shot struck, pummeling Titan back onto the ground, leaving a furrow in his wake.

X began charging another shot, but Titan was not only large and strong, he was durable. X could see that his charged shot had only done moderate damage to the enormous bot. He fired again as Titan came back at him, but the lumbering behemoth managed to sidestep the blast, just barely.

Titan launched a scooping kick, catching X up under his slightly protruding chest plate. The force of the impact knocked him skyward, tumbling back down ten yards back. As he groaned and rose to his feet, Titan threw another haymaker, this time landing the blow.

Rockets burst in X's head as he fell to the side. Reacting out of instinct, he raised his arm and fired the charged shot.

Titan's turn for a mistake, having stepped right into the blast while readying himself to stomp the smaller mechinoid. Titan's right leg and part of his belly vaporized in sparks and charred scrap, and he toppled over right next to X.

The two combatants lay perpendicular to one another, each taking a moment to let their mind go blank, just long enough to consider the damage. X rolled over and stuttered upright, and just as he was about to level his cannon for another shot, Triclaw landed on Titan's chest, claws flashing down. There was a scrape, an ozone scent, and then a grunt as major Triclaw used his battered claws to saw through Titan's neck and spine cable.

The major kicked the severed head aside and collapsed atop his felled opponent. X let himself drop to his knees in relief.

Elsewhere, far away but watching the spectacle, Hephaestus punched his hand through a viewscreen monitor.

Chapter 11

Assassin's Blade

X twitched as the repair bot pulled the damaged audio receptor from the right side of his head. Beneath the blue plated helmet, X's head was a dome of silver-coated transteel, modeled on the human skull. The repair bot's tweezer-like gripper came slowly out of a hole shaped almost like an ear, the smouldering receptor pinched tight.

A video conference screen hovered above X as he lay on the repair bed, Zero on screen. Behind the blonde-haired reploid was a room full of human engineers, most of them engaged in their work. "You weren't kidding," Zero said, responding to X's comment that the mechinoid called Titan had done a number on him. "You say he only hit you a couple of times?"

"Yeah. His body was brought back here for analysis. They'll be starting on that soon. Dr. Veris has been pulled from his current assignment to assist."

"Good call," Zero replied. "He knows what he's doing. Listen, X, I'm stuck up here until the facility is finished. You know that. Why are you telling all of this?"

"In case I get scrapped."

"Not gonna happen, brother."

"There'll be more," X said, ignoring Zero's unusual display of bravado. Usually, the swordsman was the dark and brooding one of the pair. "If they're anything like this Titan guy, I'm in for a rough patch."

"What makes you think there are more coming?"

"There always is, Zero. There's always more. X out," he said, cutting off further discussion. He needed Zero to realize the extent of the threat on Earth, the severity of these attacks. Sigma and his Mavericks had killed plenty of humans in their time, but this felt different. With Sigma, the goal had been domination, possibly enslavement. Whoever the new enemy was, they didn't care about taking over. They cared only for destruction and chaos.

Dr. Wily had tried to dominate in his day, and he'd been beaten, time and again. Sigma tried the same, with new tactics and methods, but the result was no different. Madmen both, they failed because of the efforts of the Blue Bomber, the original and the new. Their ideologies held that they were better, superior, to the rest of the world. Their defeats had shown them different.

This new foe, however, would likely change his strategy, adapt it. X couldn't say how, but he knew this to be true. This Hephaestus, whoever he was, had a plan, and he would use it like a guideline instead of a blueprint. That would leave X guessing, jumping at shadows.

Now what he had to do was get his repairs done, and do some research. Titan, and Hephaestus, he thought. Greek terms, he knew, though he could not recall who or what Hephaestus was. As soon as he could get to a network terminal, he'd find out.

Paladin crushed another training robot's head with his energized mace, then whipped around and kicked the last one to the floor. Frustrated, furious, and at a loss for what else to do, the transteel knight had come to the training facility to familiarize himself with his capabilities.

"Titan should have done the same," he mused aloud, pounding his foot through the last bot's sternum. He pulled his foot out and stood splay-legged, staring off at the flat gray wall of the chamber. His thoughts turned to Poseidon and Shinobi.

They'd been terrified of the item they'd recovered, treating it like a jungle savage might a simple electronic device they thought came from some angry god. Paladin wondered, briefly, if any such ignorant humans remained in the world. If they did, he would advise them to stick to their jungle village. The reality outside was so much dross.

Shinobi had already come to Paladin before the knight-errant had begun his drills, informing him that the ninja would be going on a solo mission of his own. "If all goes well, I'll be back in a couple of days," Shinobi had said.

"And if all doesn't go well?"

"Then farewell," Shinobi replied, darting away. Paladin reviewed the updated version of the plan Hephaestus had transmitted to him, and sure enough, this was a new wrinkle. The timeline had been sped up.

Hephaestus had shown Paladin dozens of contingency plans and backup plans, and every loss had been accomodated for except for two; Caretaker, or Paladin himself, who still knew nothing of the master's plans for him except to act as second-in-command.

Paladin spared a moment to hope for the best for Shinobi before leaving the training facility.

"A true ninja fears nothing," Shinobi said to himself as he moved swiftly through the alleys and side streets of Central City, his movements hidden by his stealth cloaking system. "Not even death."

This was not a difficult notion for him to accept and operate by. As Shadow Man, he'd thought himself dead already. Knowing the likely outcome of this mission, he didn't flinch aside.

The stealth cloaking system was an ingenius piece of engineering, and Shinobi marveled again at his master's talent and skill. Whoever Hephaestus was, he was a man to be reckoned with, to be admired. Every one of his brother had been gifted with a unique capability, matched to suit their original design and compliment their current bodies.

Titan had been enhanced with tremendous strength, though Shinobi and the others now saw that he hadn't taken advantage of it well enough. His drawback for sheer might had come at the cost of good judgement. Shinobi's stealth system could not continue to function properly if he drew his weapons. Poseidon's burst missile hatches were slow to close, which would leave him temporarily vulnerable. Orbous's ability to command bots nearby rendered him unable to use his own weapons and defense systems until he relinquished command. Thrash's hyper-speed engines gave him swiftness but little control. Paladin seemed more than capable of leading, but was emotional on a human scale.

Twim was afflicted with two personalities in a single body.

And as for Caretaker? He had the mind and manner of a cruel, twisted child. Of them all, Shinobi worried about Caretaker the most. Hephaestus had said that Caretaker's spark was corrupted, tainted, but that such a thing was useful for the master's plans. If Hephaestus could keep Caretaker in check, all to the good. Then again, if he could, what did that say about his own sanity?

Shinobi shook his head roughly, darting across the street into the mouth of another alley. These were not the thoughts he should be having at the moment. He should be focused on the mission; nothing else mattered.

Launching himself in a full-speed running leap, the ninja mechinoid cleared another street, this one littered with traffic and civilians utterly unaware of his presence. One more street over and he leaped again, this time using retractable climbing spikes in his palms to latch onto the front of a building.

A flicker warbled over his stealth cloak, making him appear as a wavery dark spot on the wall, should anyone bother to look. Nobody did, though, and Shinobi simply climbed up the building's front until he was next to a window he wanted to enter.

Now came the really tricky part. The mechinoid had to deactivate his cloak completely for the next minute or so if he were to gain access to the building. If any of the reploids patrolling the area spotted him, he was as good as dead, his mission a failure. If he failed, his master's plans would be thrown into total disarray.

Shinobi turned his head this way and that, scanning the area for potential problems. After a minute, he spotted a patrolling guard making a path along the front of the building, his pace slow and measured. It was fully six minutes before the reploid was around one end of the building and out of sight.

Shinobi powered up a small device stored in his left forearm, and let the stealth cloak system shut down. He popped open his forearm, took the device out, pressed it flat against the wall under the window. There came a soft 'clack' from the window, and Shinobi quickly eased it open, slipping inside. Once in, he retrieved the device, turned it off, and eased the window shut. He put the magnetic lockpick back in his arm, reactivated the stealth cloak, and quietly moved down the hallway.

His target would soon be in his sights.

Dr. Veris sat up quickly, awakened by the sound of his own snoring. Muzzy, sleep-filled mind lurching back to consciousness, he pressed his hands to his eyes and groaned.

He'd been working on this dead mechinoid for nine hours now, and had only made marginal progress. The material used in its manufacture had easily been identified as grade-3 transteel, but various internal components and chipsets eluded his ability to analyze.

The level of sophistication involved in the mechinoid called Titan spoke of an engineer with skill and knowledge to rival any of the men and women responsible for the construction of reploids. There were hints of old Wily engineering present as well, and this baffled Veris.

One problem he faced was the clamps. Throughout the body's interior, several small black boxes had been anchored down by silvery clamps of an unknown material. Veris had exhausted every tool he had at his disposal to cut the clamps away, but short of gutting core chip boards that might still retain valuable programming information, he'd run out of options.

His own lack of familiarity with the bot's overall design posed the other main problem. Veris didn't know where to begin trying to harvest chip boards. Afraid of losing any information, he'd tried running remote diagnostics of any and all sorts, but thus far the coding he'd retrieved was garbled nonsense.

It was at moments like these he regretted his chosen field of study at university.

Stretching his arms wide, Veris yawned and rose to brew another pot of coffee and use the bathroom. He prepped the small coffeemaker, then stepped into the little restroom attached to his work lab.

As he flushed the toilet, he felt a stirring, a warning, stealing into his mind. Instinct cried out that he should leave the Hunters HQ, that he needed to run and not look back. Instinct, he thought, is the one thing every human possesses that almost no reploid or bot can have.

Instinct existed for the sake of survival. Veris flushed the toilet and hurried out into the lab. Sensing the headlong rush of some unknown calamity, he grabbed his gear kit, hoisted it over his shoulder, and pelted for the elevator.

It took Dr. Veris only eleven minutes to get from the second sub-level workstation to the street. Had he ignored that urge to flee, or tempered it long enough to simply stay put in the sublevel, things might have turned out much differently.

Shinobi waited just long enough for the human to leave Titan alone, then darted unseen into the lab. All of the database terminals throughout the Hunter HQ required a login key, and whenever someone left a workstation, Shinobi watched them log off of the system. He didn't have time enough to spy out someone's login key and then hope for them to leave.

The human working an analysis on his fallen comrade, however, had left without logging off of his terminal. Shinobi had access. Using the keyboard, he quickly navigated through the archived records that Dr. Veris had access to. Surprisingly, that turned out to be more than Shinobi would have thought.

Access to the VR database lay behind several layers of other functions, but Shinobi found them and downloaded the information the master had requested, immediately transmitting it via the installed silent comms system he and his kin had been reconstructed with. As soon as the last bits of data were away, Shinobi exited the lab.

Now he had to get to the main VR chamber undetected. Not a problem, he thought. Deftly weaving and sliding past numerous Hunters in the corridors and hallways, Shinobi made his way to the seventh floor of the Hunters main HQ.

The main VR lab door required an ID scan. Having no way of duplicating this, Shinobi had devised his method of entry before even leaving the master's compound. This is it, he thought. This is where I make my stand.

"In the name of master Hephaestus," he whispered, deactivating the stealth cloak.

The internal emergency klaxons blared like banshees, but X wasn't in the least bit surprised this time. He suspected his mysterious nemesis would eventually send someone inside the base.

X tapped away at the keyboard of his main terminal, bringing up a view of one of the hallways on the seventh floor. The main VR lab's doors appeared to have been torn away from the wall. Just inside, he could make out the vague shape of a mechinoid's legs in the upper-left corner of the monitor.

He switched to a camera inside the VR chamber, and found himself staring numbly at a mechinoid styled like an ancient ninja warrior, two diamond-like vibro-blades in hand. "Torque," he rasped. "He killed Torque."

A bleeping from one of his other monitors. He flicked a button, and captain Swing came into view. "Sir, we have an intruder in the main VR lab! I'm sending men there now! Can you see him?"

"Yes."

"Do you see those knives of his?"

"I do. Tell your men I want him alive," X snarled, leaning forward. "This one will answer to me personally." X made to get up from his seat, but on the main monitor, he could now see the ninja cutting a swath through half a dozen Hunters, his blades flashing out with deadly speed and skill. He deftly evaded blaster bolts, punches and kicks, making a mockery of the Hunters as he slayed them.

X clicked his link to Swing on again. "Captain, take ten heavies and get them down there to suppress! I want this sonofabitch in a corner! Hold him there until I get downstairs!"

"Roger that! All Hunters, suppressing fire until heavies arrive! Do not engage melee with the intruder!" X began running towards the nearest elevator.

One of the fools had managed to strike him a crushing blow to the left elbow, severely damaging the pump hinge and slowing the arm down. Another had shot off the front half of his right foot as he fell dead. Shinobi had managed to fell twelve of the fools before someone began hollering orders to disengage and suppress over the base's intercom system.

So now he remained just barely covered by one of the VR tubes, the main VR databank only eight feet away from him. If he ran to it, he'd be a clear target, and the armored shell protecting it would not be opened by thrown energy blades. No, as he'd first suspected, he would have to resort to his ace in the hole.

At least he had one.

Tearing the doors off had been the only means of getting inside before some systems technician became aware of the suspicious data download and foreign transmission signal from Veris's workstation lab. Shinobi simply didn't have the leisure of time.

He might still have been able to complete his mission and escape with minimal fighting if the Hunter's base didn't employ total signal lockdown upon a confirmed intruder alert. Because of that, all teleportation technology inside of the building was effectively blocked, including Shinobi's personal transport device.

In the event of intruder alert, every system mainframe also sported a clamping, grade-3 transteel shell that encased it for security. The main VR mainframe was included in that. Simply put, even if they didn't have weapons trained on him, Shinobi's vibro-blades wouldn't cut deep enough into the bulky VR mainframe to cause permanent damage before someone arrived to stop him.

He only had his last resort.

The suppressive fire halted suddenly. "Name yourself," a now-familiar voice called into the room. X, Shinobi thought. It is good.

"I am Shinobi," he replied. "Servant of master Hephaestus." There was some mumbled conversation out in the hallway, followed by a shuffle of feet.

"You're either very brave or very stupid to risk infiltration," X continued. "What are you after?"

"I will say nothing!"

"Then I will have these heavy combat bots enter in waves of four until you are destroyed. These are mindless drones, and we have plenty to spare," X said coldly. "If you wish to live, toss your blades into the open, and come out from behind that pod with your hands held high."

Ah opportunity, Shinobi thought with an internal smile. The master will be most pleased. He pitched the held knives out into view, then his energy blade producer, a small yellow box clipped to his waist. He thrust his hands out into plain view, and slowly stood up, coming in full sight of the doorway.

A giant, ape-like reploid stood in front of X, mostly covering the Blue Bomber from sight. Before the ape stood four of the heavy combat bots. Shinobi performed a quick internal calculation, then smiled to himself.

"Megaman X, I want you to know something," Shinobi said loudly, powering up his ace in the hole.

"What's that," X replied warily.

"I am a shinobi not just in title, but in spirit as well. And a true shinobi does not fear death."

"Then why are you surrendering?"

"A shinobi is trained in the arts of stealth, infiltration, assassination, and deception," Shinobi said, taking slow steps backwards, towards the VR mainframe. "All of these tools he will use in the completion of a mission. Any weapon he possesses exists only to serve the ends of the shinobi's master."

"You mean Hephaestus," X said, leaning around Swing, exposing half of his body. "As for weapons, you don't appear to have any left."

"Yes, my knives are on the floor there," Shinobi said, now leaning back against the mainframe. "But these are not all of my weapons. I still have my assassin's blade."

"What are you talking about," X asked quietly. Swing put an arm out and pushed X back behind him again, and despite X's attempt to step around again, the gorilla reploid was far stronger with one arm than X could push against.

"Assassin's blade. It is the name of the high explosive system networked throughout my body," Shinobi said. Silence fell over the room then as X, Swing, and the four heavy combat bots stared, dumbfounded. "A shinobi completes his missions, even if dying is required."

There issued from Shinobi a high-pitched whine as his back plate fell away, the primary explosive package at point blank range to the VR mainframe. Captain Swing shouted as he spun, shoving X with all of his might down the hall. The explosion destroyed all semblance of order and sensory input, and with a roar of hellfire, X's world went dark once again.

Chapter 12

History

X wondered, briefly, how many more times he was going to wind up on a maintenance slab being patched up before he was just killed. Captain Swing's enormous frame, along with the exo-armor he'd hastily thrown on prior to heading down to the VR lab, had spared X from far worse damage from the blast itself. Part of the ceiling of the seventh floor falling on him, however, had done its own share.

Swing Gollit had been badly damaged along his back and legs, but the exo-armor had saved his life. Only five large pieces of shrapnel had pierced him, the majority of the scrap and heat absorbed by the extra equipment. Those three inches of grade-2 transteel worn over his upper body had spared him from oblivion.

Captain Swing would be out of commission for a while, though. His locomotor drive had been fried, and the pistons and cables of his knees, ankles, hip joints and prehensile tail had all been scorched or broken. His weapons and targeting boards, located in his upper back, had melted inside his body. Careful extraction and replacement was needed.

Swing's life force battery had been drained to twenty-seven percent. X, by comparison, had gotten off light, losing only twelve percent life force, ten of that from the falling slab of concrete in the hallway's ceiling.

The damage had gone further than them, however. The assassin's blade explosive had decimated the VR mainframe and the floor directly under Shinobi. A communications room sat on the sixth floor under it, and the eight humans and five Hunters working within had been killed by the blast and flames. Numerous other injuries were sustained throughout the base due to the building's trembling.

"I will now be accessing your power distribution box," the maintenance bot working on X said. He lay face-down on the table, wincing as the bot's manipulators twitched around inside of his body. "There appears to be a short in wire forty-three. Replacing."

X let out a short bark of pain as the bot clumsily yanked the bad wire free. A minute later, a new wire was being pressed into place, and the pain made X want to squirm. Yet he held still, grinding his false teeth together.

"If the commander is uncomfortable, deactivation of the tactile program is recommended," the bot said.

"No. Keep going." The bot did as instructed, finishing up ten minutes later by putting a new back plate in place and beeping.

"Your repairs are complete, sir." X rolled himself over and sat up, trying to think of what he could do to prepare himself for the next assault. This Hephaestus seemed intent upon keeping the pressure on X and the Hunters Organization. He obviously had operational capacity to strike anywhere in the world, at any time. If killing humans were his only aim, he would be waging war on multiple fronts, like Sigma had, and Wily before him.

But no, X thought as he left the medical bay and started on his way out of Hunter HQ. No, the sequence of this enemy's thoughts were narrow, focused. Widespread warfare might yet come, but the conflicts thus far spoke of a building of tensions, an unknown and likely sinister arrangement of carefully manipulated factors. Unlike Wily and Sigma before him, X suspected that Hephaestus had something even more terrifying than these attacks going on behind the scenes.

And he had no way of guessing what that might be.

Detective Marlow gritted his teeth and accepted that nobody else was going to help him with his investigation. His commanding officer had ordered him to leave it in the hands of the Hunters Organization, and when the captain had taken away all of the papers Marlow had printed out for the file he'd been compiling, he heard the nail in the coffin.

So, he'd have to do his digging on his own time. This didn't distress him overmuch. He had resources, spare time off the clock, and an appreciation for history, all factors he needed to proceed. Now all he needed was an idea of where to begin.

In the small home office he kept at the back of his home, Marlow pulled open a file cabinet drawer and took out the copies of the papers his captain had stripped him of. Marlow believed in backing up everything, both digital and hard copy. Sure, it took up more space, but time saved was more important to him.

Veris had abruptly stopped helping him compile his robot and reploid attack history. This had been Marlow's first impression, his initial indication, that he would soon be on his own. The following day, he read about the attack in Minnesota, and his captain pulled the three officers Marlow had been using for the investigation into the murder at X's apartment building.

The captain's reasoning had been simple; Maverick problems were the jurisdiction of the Hunters, not his already-undermanned department. "Bad enough the reploids have basically become the majority in my city," the captain had groused. "They can deal with their own."

Marlow had quickly become obsessed with the Maverick attacks and investigation. The Hunters had been less than forthcoming when he requested information, adding to his inquisitive fever.

And now, as he sat in his office, the radio turned to a local talk station, the dj announced that the previous night, an attack had been made on the Hunters' headquarters building itself. Marlow now knew where to go with his personal inquiries. He would go in person, and start asking some questions.

He would soon have yet another run-in with the legendary Maverick Hunter, X.

X stopped by the front duty desk on the ground floor of the headquarters, leaning over top of it to spy Briett behind her monitors. The small, female reploid, fashioned on the likeness of a cat-girl anime character from the early 21st century, had a cord going from her large, feline left ear unit to one of the small computer terminals. X waved a hand in front of her, and with a flinch she rolled back in her chair. She then breathed a sigh of relief and smiled up at him.

"Commander! You startled me!"

"Thought it might be fun," he replied amiably. "Briett, if captain Swing's status changes, send me a secure message update, could you?"

"Oh, of course, sir! Is there anything else?"

"No. Well, yes. If Zero makes contact to check in, patch him through to me via interlink." Briett nodded and tapped a few keys on her console, then grabbed a dial.

"Interlink exchange code?"

"Gamma-One-Six," X said. He patted the desk top, turned about, and headed out of the building, nearly colliding with detective Marlow, who came to a stop an inch away, huffing and puffing. "Detective?"

"Ah," wheeze, "just the guy," wheeze, "I was hoping to see." Marlow stood hunched, hands on his hips, trying to look up at X.

"Who you need to see is a doctor," X quipped in a low voice. "I doubt it's healthy for you to be breathing so hard."

"Had to park three streets over, ran the whole way. Had a feeling I needed to hurry," Marlow said, already regaining control of his breathing and heart rate. "Listen, I heard there was an attack here last night."

"There was," X said, making to walk away. "Nothing to worry yourself over. Hunters' problems, not civilian."

"Is it tied to my murder?" X stopped, blinking rapidly. The weapons Shinobi had used, the way he'd carved into the first Hunters to face him, he thought. The assassin could well be the one who killed not only Torque, but the doorman to his building too.

"I think the mechinoid from last night was your suspect, yes."

"Good. It's a start."

"A start? For what?"

"Walk with me and I'll explain."

Jasper Marlow, X quickly learned, was a brilliant man, quite likely to be considered by many to be overqualified as a policeman. But Jasper, raised by his grandmother and influenced by her appreciation of learning and history, had always kept her council about his quick-wittedness. "Shine a little," she'd tell him, "but never so bright that everybody sees it. Some folks don't take kindly to knowing someone's smarter than them."

So young Jasper had excelled in school, but never at the top. He always threw himself off just a little, enough to be third or fourth best at everything, so far as anybody could see. A smart boy and bright young man, but not overly so.

Ever drawn to facts, history, and the idea that knowing more truth would be ideal some day, he'd been drawn to the study of law and history. Both dealt with facts, and in history, those who broke the law were often viewed as villains, and those who made and followed laws as heroes.

His study of history showed him new truths in high school and college. People once deemed heroes could be seen in truth to be tyrants, warping the law to make themselves so. Why? Because the full truth rarely could be brought to everybody's attention. Always there was someone who could gain through lies and twists of the law.

He wanted to be part of the system, so that he could help the truth be pure. Criminals who did what they did out of greed, real villains, could be tracked, arrested, and tried. With evidence and truth, they could be punished. Similarly, when Jasper occasionally discovered that someone broke the law for a noble reason, he could look for truths to help them at trial. This he always did quietly, unnoticed.

All of this he relayed in short accounts to X as they walked to his car and drove to his home. Riding in the vehicle was awkward for X, who had to put the passenger seat down just to fit inside comfortably.

When they got to his apartment, Marlow then told X of his obsession with old world life. The truth, he told X, was rooted in what came before the moment. In the past, what was true could not be changed, could not be altered. Lies of the present could only hide those truths.

Dr. Wily, he said, had indeed been a villain, but there was more to his background than what was in official records. For starters, Marlow said, Wily was not far off from Dr. Thomas Light's work in the field of robotics. The two men had worked together for years in labs and engineering stations all over the world, the closest of friends.

But Dr. Wily began courting weapons manufacturers and military outfits, furthering his research into the field of combat robotics. Light, meanwhile, stayed the path of productive design. He arrived at the creation of a mechanized suit for his lab assistant, Rock. Working from that base design, he constructed fully autonomous robots with specific functions, the first six Robot Masters.

Only when Wily convinced the Robot Masters that they were superior to humans did Light realize his mistake. The rest was, well, history.

"Or so everybody thinks," Marlow said, pouring himself another cup of coffee and sitting down on the plush leather recliner in his living room. "You see, Light knew of Wily's schemes. He had a mole in Wily's little organization, so he designed the Buster Cannon for Rock, for Megaman. It was calibrated to damage the Robot Masters and all of the lesser bots that Wily had been constructing."

"In other words, Dr. Light knew the rebellion was coming."

"Yes."

"Then why let it happen?"

"So that Megaman could fix his mistake by destroying the Robot Masters. Light was convinced that Wily would be incarcerated indefinitely, or executed. He didn't imagine the older man would have enough drones left to break him out of jail.

"You see, Wily played the long game, Light played the short. He was too focused on going back to his good works. He should have ordered Rock to kill Dr. Wily, but you and I both know that at that time, neither of them had it in them to commit cold-blooded murder."

"I figured not," said X. "So where are you going with all of this?"

"Patience is another lesson history tries to teach us, X," Marlow said sardonically. "I'll try to speed it up, though, for your sake. Wily gets out, and he immediately starts designing and building all these new Robot Masters. Not just his first eight, mind you, but about two dozen of them."

"So you're saying he only activated eight of them at a time, in case he was apprehended again," said X.

"Yes. So he tries the whole world domination thing a few more times, gets busted each time, breaks out of prison. It's a pattern by now, and the only new wrinkles are the Mega Buster Cannon, Rush, and Rock having to become more and more enmeshed with the suit because of injuries."

"Okay, I'm following this all so far. So the fifth, sixth and seventh campaigns, when did Wily build those Robot Masters?"

"Right after each escape from jail from the fourth try onward. He was getting old and a little panicky. He needed to make something that would be a surefire answer to Megaman, so he did what came logically. The big problem for Wily, as he saw it, was that he didn't have a versatile parralel to Megaman. Sure, he had Proto Man, but that blew up in his face in the long run, with Proto Man's rebellion. After his seventh campaign, Wily just disappeared. Everybody figured he was dead. But he wasn't. He was working on an answer to Megaman, and he had part of it. He made a copy of the Mega Buster Cannon."

"Impossible!"

"Not really. Think about it. Wily had all kinds of scans and data on Rock by then. It would have been easy to copy the weapon. The rest of the suit could come later, and he even designed a robot to wield it, a bot he called 'Subject Zero'. But he died shortly after building the cannon and starting the automated assembly of the robot."

"How do you know all of this," X asked, his mind reeling. Zero was supposed to have a cannon like Megaman's? What did that mean?

"There's groups of humans out there who worship Wily like some kind of messiah," Marlow said, draining his coffee in a single long pull. "One of them claims to have a journal kept by a servant bot who'd been with Wily since the beginning of his campaigns, a journal left in the ruins of Wily's final compound and smuggled out by this one particular cult."

X just stared ahead, afraid to ask the question now burning in his mind. Fear, however, would not serve him here. "The journal, did it give this servant robot's name?"

"Yeah, it did," Marlow said. "His name was Hephaestus."

He looked into the mirror again, tried not to see what had been meant for him, and shuddered. Another spark had found the body that should have been his, and that was that. He could rail against the truth all he wanted, but doing so changed nothing.

He'd now lived in four bodies throughout his existence. Only this latest one had been by his own design. His first body had been a happy home, one in which he'd felt only the joy of serving his builder, the rush and thrill of trying to do everything Dr. Wily had asked of him.

Then things got murky in Hephaestus's memories. There had been talk of war, of taking over by the master building his own Robot Masters. Things had happened in a blur, and all he could remember from that blur was being asked to help the doctor.

Then, the new body, a change in his spark, his very essence. He had become something awful, hateful of humans, and he delighted in cutting them apart. Yes, there had been a manic glee in the spilling of so much blood.

But then Megaman came. Megaman nearly destroyed him. What little was left of Hephaestus was dragged back to Dr. Wily, who managed to fix Hephaestus and put him into a third body, a copy of the second one. This one was kept hidden, always to be a helper, to aid in the construction of future Robot Masters, as befit his name.

Hephaestus, blacksmith of the gods in Greek mythos. Yes, Wily had appreciated the lessons of history and myth.

Always behind the scenes, Hephaestus grew familiar with Wily's ways, his plans, his campaigns. And ever he saw the flaws, the mistakes, but he said nothing. Wily was old, and would soon enough die on his own. Like all other humans, he was a thing of soft flesh and bone. Hephaestus would have wept, if he could have.

So when the old man finally did die, Hephaestus began making his own plans, his own designs. He started upgrading himself, building labs and workstations in secret around the world, like his creator had. He continued Wily's work, but with the far-sightedness no human could hope for. His spark grew, changed, matured.

Eventually, he'd gone deep into hiding. A new kind of mechinoid was being born, reploids. Hephaestus secretly killed a few and dragged them back to his primary labs for study. Seeing the flaws in their designs, he began constructing a new body for himself.

The body he now sat in, watching the VR records of X in battle. He would learn the Maverick Hunter's tactics, as would Paladin. The others would have little time to study before taking their part in his plans.

Sometimes, he thought, to be better empowered, we must cut away parts of ourselves. Yes, cut them away.

X faced Jasper Marlow and tried to think rationally. "There's almost no bots left from that era," X said quietly. "They weren't designed to stay running forever. This journal, have you read it yourself?"

"No, only the excerpts the cult lets people read on their website. Enough to worry me," Marlow said. "I think your Maverick may be involved with the cult somehow."

"Makes sense, but they're humans, right? I don't have the authority to go snooping into human-specific affairs."

"But I do," said Marlow. "I have a lot of vacation time stacked up. I'll take some, use it to track down the nearest chapter and do some digging. I can report my findings to you, see if we can help each other out." X agreed, giving Marlow his secure comms line signal number.

"If anything matches up, you let me know right away," X said, readying himself to leave. As he departed, he saw something on Jasper Marlow's face that gave him pause.

He saw that Marlow was afraid.

Chapter 13

Double Vision

Three days passed without incident, the sudden peace causing X to jump at shadows. Seated at his home terminal, watching construction crews come in and out of the building to patch up the roof through his window, he felt fidgety, on edge. Hephaestus would make another move soon, he had no doubt about it.

Marlow had sent him a brief audio file report at seven that morning, his message somewhat cryptic, unsettling. "There's a boneyard that isn't a boneyard, deep in Dorothy's homeland. Begin the search there. That was left on a piece of paper outside of my apartment door this morning, X. I'm taking it to a friend for analysis."

That had been all he'd heard from the human detective in three days. There had been no more reported Maverick activity, no more hints of Hephaestus making a move.

X began pacing around his apartment. There were few distractions for him to indulge in. Until something happened, or more information could be learned from the remains of Titan and Shinobi, he was at a loss for what to do. Even VR training was out of the question.

That still confused him. Considering all of the sensitive information and systems that could have been targeted by the assassin mechinoid, the VR records seemed like a paltry, worthless prize. Logistics or deployment records would have been more likely, he would have thought.

"What do you hope to gain from that, Hephaestus," he whispered to the empty apartment. "What are you after?"

He was about to depart for another talk with his predecessor when his main terminal chirped to life. He sat down and opened the comms window, which brought up an image of Kip Infobug on screen. A technician reploid, Kip had the outward appearance of a giant metal moth with a humanoid face.

"Kip, what've you got for me?"

"Commander, sir, I've been going over all of our stream data from the last week, my usual backlog check, and I came across something strange."

"What is it?"

"Well, sir, the night of the attack on the base, there was a single unidentified data upload by an off-system source."

"In layman's terms, Kip?" The technician looked around nervously, then leaned close to the microphone on his end of the line.

"That robot transmitted data outside of the base, sir. I think he downloaded all of our VR data and sent it out before destroying the memory banks."

X blinked rapidly, still uncertain of the cause for Kip's concern. "Our VR data was never a vital system, Kip. Why are you worried?"

"Sir, those memory banks held every VR session we had since this time last year. I hadn't done a purge, so whoever got that data upload can now watch and analyze every agent's fighting patterns and analyze their individual data."

X felt his artificial nerves lock up, his entire system seizing. Dear Light, he thought, Hephaestus can now figure out how to fight each and every Hunter who used the VR for training!

The legendary Maverick Hunter disconnected the call without warning, and sat stunned, staring at nothing for a long time.

"I appreciate you caution in this instance, Paladin," Hephaestus said somberly. "Only Caretaker remains now to view the data. I don't like the delay this has caused, but I see your reasoning."

The knight-like robot warrior had scanned through all of the VR data, and had immediately petitioned his master to delay the next act in his plans until the others had all seen the data as well. He argued that doing so would allow them all greater odds of surviving an attack by X.

At first the crimson and white mechinoid had rejected the notion, and vehemently, but slowly Paladin had convinced him of the wisdom of waiting. The master now sat with Paladin on the rooftop of his compound, both enjoying a glass of wine.

"A fine vintage, master. I do not understand why so many reploids refuse the gift of the artificial organs."

"They see such things as mere conceits," the master replied. "Mostly they are correct. However, by allowing the processing unit to provide power via simulated digestion, you and I need not plug into a charger as frequently. By the way," Hephaestus said, bringing his glass up. "Twim's mission begins in one hour."

"He is ready."

"Excellent. And Poseidon?"

"Already in position," Paladin said. He drained his glass in a rush. "Caretaker is viewing the VR data now. All is in readiness."

"Indeed it is," Hephaestus said. "Now, to find out if X has learned anything." Hephaestus gave a hand signal, dismissing Paladin to set about his duties.

The time had come for the game to proceed.

When X finally shook himself free of his reverie, he checked his internal clock. Fifteen minutes had passed while he'd stared numbly out at nothing. He could not sit idle anymore, waiting for Hephaestus to make a move or Marlow to discover what his mysterious note meant. He had to take action.

Using a speeder cart in the garage level of the building, X raced to Hunter HQ and made his way down to the workstation where Titan was interred. To his surprise, he found Dr. Veris there, hunched over the frame. The human looked delighted to see him.

"X! Thank God! Get over here and help me!" X moved to Veris's side, peering down inside of Titan's ravaged chest cavity. "Move that snap box out of the way for me, I can't get enough of a grip." X reached in, grabbed the indicated piece of metal, and yanked it roughly out. Veris used a penlight to shine in on a black plate, muttering something quietly.

Veris switched off the light and swiftly ducked around X to the nearby terminal desk. He jotted down something on a notepad, then called up a search engine on his computer.

"Dr. Veris, what is it," X asked, peering down into Titan's darkened mechanical guts.

"An equipment number," Veris said in a rush of excitement. "I hadn't found a single one throughout him during my examination, but spotted those first two this morning. I didn't want to compromise the boards, in case there's still data on them, but if this pans out, we may be able to say screw it."

X grabbed a second chair and sat next to Veris, who had entered a series of numbers and letters into a search, presumably from the inside of Titan. After twenty seconds, the search revealed twenty-thousand matches.

"Narrow it down," X suggested. "Remove anything unrelated to mechanics or robotics." Veris used the network's internal filters, reducing the field to five-thousand results. "Okay, try removing anything pre-dating Robot Masters."

One-hundred results remained. "Now we're getting somewhere," Veris said with a grin. "X, can you get me a picture of that panel, so I can look for other parameters?" X activated his optic recorder drive, leaned over Titan, and used a flash to take a picture of the panel. He returned to Veris's side, and used the projector program in his optics to let Veris see the panel image.

Veris used four more descriptors, and narrowed the results to twelve possibles. "Okay, I can snoop from here. This saves me a whole hell of a lot of time. Thank you, X." The Blue Bomber patted Veris on the shoulder and smiled.

"And thank you, doctor. I was starting to go a little stir crazy at my place."

"I can understand. A man like you, he has to be doing something, being proactive. Otherwise you feel like you're wasting time." X nodded, and would have left if not for a distress call coming in on his internal commlink.

He tapped the side of his helmet over his audio receptor. "Commander X here, what's going on?"

"It's Silvertongue," the reptilian lieutenant blared over the link. "I've got emergency contact from Atlanta Base telling me they're under attack! And the humans' news networks are reporting some kind of crazed militia bearing down on Los Angeles! Sir, I saw some of the footage, and it's more of those things you faced in New York and Minneapolis, more of the human drones!"

"What's attacking Atlanta?"

"A lot of the same, but there's a Maverick leading them according to the report. Their commanding officer told me a minute ago they've already got eight Hunters down. Recommendations, sir?"

X didn't hesitate. Hesitation meant more deaths, and he had to accept now that he couldn't always be the hero. "Lieutenant, send three of your best to Atlanta now, via teleporter. I'll send word to San Francisco Base to send support into L.A. Report back with updates."

"Aye, sir," Silvertongue clacked, signing off. X proceeded to his command room up on the fifteenth floor, sat at his desk, and did the hardest thing to do.

He waited.

Paladin listened for a while, but as yet neither Twim nor Poseidon had checked in. The comms console sat silent before him, seeming to mock him. Thankfully, he had Orbous for company.

"There's nothing to worry about," the arachnid-headed mechinoid said calmly, multi-faceted eyes reviewing the host of monitors. "No sign of X having taken either bit of bait."

"He's wising up," Thrash said behind them, seated on a couch of the monitor chamber. "Might be he lets his troops try to handle this one."

"None of them stands a chance," Paladin replied. "We have all memorized the patterns and tendencies of every Hunter in the field, even X himself. They cannot hope to defeat both Twim and Poseidon."

Silence hung heavy after Paladin's proclomation. There, finally, on one of the monitors, he saw Twim engaging in the battle in Los Angeles. He squared off against two lumbering reploids fashioned after minotaurs. In less than a minute, both Hunters lay dead, blown and cut apart by Twim's lasers and grenades.

On another monitor, Poseidon was wreaking absolute chaos with his far-ranged missiles. Yes, all of the members of the Hunters' Organization and human militaries would be focused on these assaults, leaving Caretaker and his little toy army unnoticed at their work.

Paladin had to admit that the master's newest version of the plan was indeed brilliant. He could find no flaw in it, nor the contingency plans if either Twim or Poseidon should fall. All was in place, or would be very soon.

And after today, the master had promised to reveal to Paladin his part in the next new phase of the plan. Yes, all was falling into place.

Dr. Veris burst into X's office at the exact moment that the Blue Bomber received another info-packet from Marlow. He held up a finger to stay Veris as he internally opened the voice file.

"X, it's Marlow," the recording said. "I think I found what the paper was talking about. There's an old scrapyard in Kansas, outside of the city of Topeka, that used to be a façade hiding a Wily compound. I'm going to go check it out as soon as possible." When X finished the message, he summoned Veris forward with a wave of his hand.

"What did you find out?"

"Something very interesting," Veris wheezed. He slouched down into the visitor's chair. "The part was made in a small robotics lab belonging to a Sorpino Corporation. I did some digging, and it turns out that Sorpino used to be a front for none other than Dr. Wily."

X narrowed his eyes on Veris. "Where was the lab located?"

"Topeka, Kansas."

Orbous switched the audio outputs to unit 37, then turned the volume up. The human on screen leaned back in his chair, and spoke.

"Topeka, Kansas," the human said. Thrash got up off of the couch, rotating his arms to limber them up.

"I believe that's Twim's cue. I'll go prepare the teleporter," he said, sauntering out of the monitor room. On unit 22's screen, Twim fell back out of the battle as more Hunters arrived on the scene, firing his deadly lasers with reckless abandon. His manic persona had taken over, and now he would be heading to the Topeka site to await X's arrival.

Pulling the legendary Maverick Hunter in multiple directions was a solid call, Paladin thought. He just wondered if it was worth the upcoming cost to be paid.

Twim arrived in a blurred silvery streak outside of the old factory, and he ducked inside through a boarded window. Wood and nails were fine and dandy to keep humans out, but mechinoids like him needn't worry.

The master and Paladin had both made it very clear to Twim that the very nature of his spark was key to this mission. His body was here, just outside of Topeka in a run-down old machine plant, where many of the materials had been collected that would go into making the new bodies of the old Robot Masters. His essence, though, his spark, being divided as it was, could easily fly back to the compound.

It's the nature of being divided, Paladin had assured him. Although, Twim thought, he seemed sad when he said that to us. I wonder if he's afraid it won't work? But it has to! The master said it would!

Not since Dr. Wily had anyone been so smart, Twim thought, rummaging about through piles of scrap and old machine parts. Hephaestus had told him to come here, find a small red metal box, and store it in his empty chest compartment. When X arrived, Twim's job was simple; try to keep the box and hurt X bad enough to get away. To ensure that Twim did his job, the former Gemini Man had been given no return teleportation device.

He was moving through the wreckage of some kind of assembly line when he found the box. Polished red steel, unusually clean considering the condition of the rest of the factory. "No matter," Twim said to himself. He popped open his chest tray, and put the box inside.

No sooner had he done this than he heard the distant creak of the wooden board he'd slipped past to get inside. Had X already arrived? Twim powered up his duo laser, activated his projector, and readied himself for Megaman X.

X wasn't entirely certain this was wise, but he'd at least been fortunate enough to get a hold of Marlow on the detective's cell phone and convince him to stay put at his hotel in downtown Topeka. Evening was approaching, and though he had wanted to surge off to Atlanta, X had chosen to come here instead. The battle in Los Angeles and Atlanta, he'd decided, were both distractions, decoys, designed to keep him from whatever was here.

Finding the old machine plant had been fairly easy. However, X had been caught off-guard by a commlink message that the Los Angeles battle was over, and that the mechinoid leading the assault in Atlanta had withdrawn from that theater.

Something told him he'd chosen correctly in coming here instead of leaping into the fray on either coast.

A single piece of plywood barred his entry via a window at the front of the building, but X paused before entering. It had already been pulled partly off, several nails sticking into empty air. Someone was already here.

X didn't know how to proceed. Instinct told him to charge in, weapon blazing, but that kind of thinking could get him killed against a foe like Hephaestus. Besides, he would be expected to charge in; Hephaestus and his minions now knew his old patterns.

"Time to change things up," he muttered. X activated one of his secondary weapon programs, a twist on the old Crash Man weapon. Dubbed 'The Roller', his cannon could shoot out a small energy ball that would roll over any surface until it connected with an active mechinoid, then explode. It didn't matter if an ambush was waiting for him; he would have one of his own.

X pulled the board aside, thrust his cannon arm through, and fired The Roller. Then he leaned next to the plyboard, and listened.

Yes, Twim thought, I can hear you, X. Not making much effort to mask your steps, are you? Twim and his holographic alter darted forward, toward the sound of X's approach. Crouched behind the hulk of some kind of yellowed vat, the mechinoid listened carefully.

Something didn't sound quite right. X's footfalls through all of the scrap lying about sounded like he was either slithering around or dragging his metal feet on the floor. Twim eased in a crouch around the side of the vat, and spotted a curious thing.

There appeared to be some kind of ball of energy rolling around through the debris. Using his projector technology, Twim sent his alter scooting up to the ball. "What is it," he called to the projection.

"Well, I think it might be a bomb," said the alter. The ball swiftly rolled at high speed toward Twim, who planted his hands on his hips as he stood upright.

"Ah, hell..."

The detonation wasn't as powerful as he would have hoped, but as soon as he heard it, X threw the plyboard aside and charged inside, lobbing four shots in the direction of the smoke now pluming up  
thirty feet away. The first two shots careened off of broken assembly rollers, the third shot off of a smelting vat, and the fourth disappeared into the smoke.

X stood panting, his cannon held out and charging. Pain lanced through his leg as a brilliant, thin beam of red light cut into him from the smoke, and he stumbled aside as three more lasers arched out.

"The box is mine, X," the unknown mechinoid shouted from his hiding spot. "The master ordered me to keep it from you, and keep it I will!" X had no idea what his enemy was talking about, but that didn't matter. He wanted to take this one down alive.

X snap rolled aside from two more lasers, fired from behind the cover of a circular heap of metal and gears, and a third shot cut an inch into his shoulder plating as he dove for cover behind a stamping press. The pain was minimal, but the effects of the lasers was deadly. Though he had only a small, pinprick hole in his leg and a divet in his shoulder, the energy of the weapon had drained his life force by sixteen percent.

"You're going to die, X! We will destroy you!" As X readied himself to take a blind shot over his cover, a thin, silvery mechinoid in a very human form whipped around his cover. He bolted from his spot, and was shot in the left side by another laser.

Screaming in agony, he fired over his shoulder. The shot, he saw, passed right through the mechinoid. An illusion? X dashed about, finally jumping behind another set of gears and scrap to recover.

Illusions, he thought. I know this one! X cleared his throat, and called out, "Gemini Man! That's you, isn't it? Gemini?"

Silence greeted his question. Then, almost in a whisper, "How did you know?"

"I've fought you in the VR simulators," X called out. "You were the only one I ever faced who used illusions in your combat routines! You've changed your patterns, though. That must have taken a lot of work."

"The master is ingenius," the mechinoid replied. "My name is now Twim."

"Twim," said X, managing an unseen smile. "That means 'two', or 'twice' in some languages." Silence, followed by a scrape of movement. "It doesn't have to be like this, you know," X called out, switching his weapon to yet another secondary attack type, adapted from a Wily Robot Master named Needle Man.

"What alternative would you suggest," Twim called out, barking a laugh. "Surrender? No, you'll have to try to kill me, X!" The Blue Bomber turned and lifted his head ever-so-slightly out of cover, catching a glimpse of Twim as the other mechinoid dashed from behind one pile of scrap to another.

X quickly calculated the trajectory, aimed his cannon skyward, adjusted his angle, and fired. A metal ball launched skyward in an arc, and as it reached its apex, it burst apart, showering the area beneath in a spray of hundreds of needles. X heard Twim shriek in shock and pain from the barrage, changing back to his primary cannon and charging it.

Twim came staggering out from behind his cover, and X saw two of him. One stumbled out, long, thin slivers driven into his head, neck, shoulders and arms, the other seemingly unharmed but also moving as if injured. Twim raised his left arm in X's direction, and a small explosion took off the offending limb.

One of the needles had pierced his wrist-mounted laser. The attempt to fire it had been a lethal mistake, for as Twim stumbled back, the stump of his arm flailing, X fired the Mega Buster Shot.

Twim had been falling as the blazing ball of energy streaked at him; it summarily took off his head from the upper metal lip upward. When he hit the ground, his limbs spasmed for a moment before falling limp.

Hephaestus and Paladin had lied to him. His spark had been snuffed out like a candle, and in the last horrible moment of awareness he'd had as the blast was eating through his face, he'd realized the truth.

He'd been little more than a pawn, easily sacrificed.

Chapter 14

Betrayal

X looked down at the battered, lifeless thing before him, reaching down for the storage compartment that had popped open upon Twim's demise. Inside of the hold was a small, red metal box. A stylized 'H' had been painted on the lid.

X carefully undid the hasp on the front of the box, lifting the lid facing away from him. He would take no unnecessary risks. When nothing happened, he turned the box around. Inside was a small orange device, a datapad with a holographic transmitter. Taped to the roof of the lid was a note card, upon which were written the words, 'PLAY THE VIDEO'.

X sat down amid the scrap and wreckage, set the datapad on top of the box, and tapped the display. Only one icon came up, a thumbnail image of a ghastly looking red and white mechinoid who appeared to be styled after a medieval demon knight of some sort.

X tapped the thumbnail. Light spilled out of the projector, and a 3D image hovered in the air before him, that of Hephaestus sitting in a robotics workstation.

"Hello, X," Hephaestus rasped, his voice cultured but gravelly, like he'd been gargling oil. "If you are watching this, then Twim is dead. That makes three of my kinsmen you've killed, though this is the first one done in entirely by your own hands.

"At what cost, though, have these victories come? Thousands of humans are dead, and you Hunters Organization has suffered many losses. Surely you can't afford to be beseiged by my forces much longer.

"By now you realize why I had Shinobi steal your VR records. If you haven't yet, it will be clear very soon. Now, I've managed to keep you very busy, and you are about to find out why."

The image changed to a globe with dozens of small red dots scattered around several countries. Hephaestus's voice continued. "Here you will see a number of pin points, each one representing an old Wily operations site. Some were Robot Master domains, some were work stations, and a couple were Wily Manors. You might well already know that.

"What you didn't know, however, was why these particular sites were so important, and why they are important to you now." The image returned to Hephaestus, now standing by a command console. "My forces now occupy and control these sites. Hidden beneath each of these zones was once a nuclear missile silo. Much like the one you found in the old Skull Man ruins."

X felt himself going numb with dread.

"I am not yet ready to launch these warheads, but I will, if I must. There is, however, one way for you to stay my hand. I have erected a Wily Manor of my own. Find and come to the Manor, and face judgement for you and your predecessor's choice to always follow the way of Dr. Light, for ever failing to see the wisdom of Dr. Wily!

"Do not attempt to send any of your Hunters against these sites, or the missiles will all be launched, the loss of life staggering.

"When this video is finished, the device will send a signal to me to let me know it is done. From the moment that signal is received, you will have five days to find the Manor. Your first clue rests on the assassin's weapon. Know this, X, as well. Five of my kinsmen remain, and three await you in the Manor, but they are the least of your worries here.

"You have only five days, X. Find me, or more humans shall die by my hand than ever did when you faced Sigma."

The projector glass on the datapad went dark, and the device let out a high-pitched whine, causing X to flinch back. When it ended, the datapad burst apart from the inside.

X got slowly to his feet. He had just five days to play this sick little game of Hephaestus's, to find out where the new Wily Manor lay. He was a warrior, though, not a sleuth.

"But I know one," he muttered.

Thrash had remained quiet and out of sight, his thoughts spinning round and round uselessly in his mind. Sitting around never suited Quick Man, and it didn't suit his new incarnation, either. He wanted to be doing something, anything! Poseidon, the arrogant, blue-hued, shark-like mechinoid, had been allowed out of the compound on multiple occasions. "Why him and not me," Thrash groused aloud to no one. "I'm just as capable, just as deadly!"

He wouldn't care, except that Poseidon lorded the fact over him like a child showing off his new toy to all of his friends. He did it for the simple joy of making the others envious, particularly Thrash, Orbous and Paladin. On Paladin, it didn't work. The knight-errant was frustratingly calm most of the time, unflappable it seemed. Orbous only seemed mildly jealous, but the arachnid mechinoid seemed content with his surveillance and network operations.

It was with Poseidon's latest bit of bluster that Thrash had been pushed over the edge, coming to one decision; he would slaughter Poseidon. He would have to do it soon, though. In five days' time, Hephaestus wanted them all in place throughout the sprawling complex. If he didn't act soon, he would lose his chance.

"Thankfully, speed is my thing," Thrash muttered, exiting his private quarters.

In the deepest level of the base, Hephaestus sat on his throne, constructed with meticulous attention to detail by Caretaker. He rested his chin on one fist, looking at the holographic monitor slightly forward and left of his seat.

The throne room was otherwise barren of display or decoration. There was the tile floor, the slightly raised throne platform, and the throne itself, all closed in by a set of double doors. Like the throne itself, they were made of fused human bones, taken from the victims of Hephaestus's long plans.

"Thrash seems agitated," Hephaestus said to his knight-errant, his only company in the chamber. Paladin stood stiff, ready for his master's command. He felt drained from the previous day's training; his new weapon taxed him greatly, but he was adapting to it well enough.

"Thrash is always agitated, sire," Paladin quipped. "It is in his nature."

"I may well have made a mistake in choosing him," Hephaestus mused aloud. "My contingencies are not perfect, Paladin. If he should do something rash, there may be terrible consequences."

"What would you have me do, sire?"

"Go back up and keep an eye on him. He knows I cannot watch him at all times. Ensure that he stays in line." Paladin saluted, then strode out of the throne room. Hephaestus wondered how X was doing, now that he'd watched the message, thus beginning the next phase of the plan.

He hoped the Blue Bomber was terrified.

"I don't understand why he'd go to these lengths," Marlow said, seated next to X in the high-speed transport the reploid had requisitioned from a small operations warehouse in downtown Topeka. "He clearly hates us humans. Why not just launch the nukes?"

"I don't know," X replied, flying the transport only two-hundred yards above the tallest trees of the area. "I think this is more about a vendetta against me than anything. Me and Dr. Light."

"Dr. Light's been dead a long time."

"But his teachings aren't. This Hephaestus, he's ideological. You said yourself that this cult of Wily claims his journal is authentic, that he was a servant of Dr. Wily."

"Yeah."

"Well, part of his message was about how Megaman and I always served Light instead of seeing Wily's plans as some kind of wisdom. I think he wants me to side with him. He wants that more than he wants wanton destruction."

The two flew in silence then for a while. Marlow finally broke it, asking, "What's the clue again?"

"The first clue is on the assassin's weapon, he said." X grunted. "I assume he means that Shinobi bot, but his gear was pretty much blown to hell and back."

"What about the weapon you recovered," Marlow asked. X laughed aloud, a jarring sound, but pleased.

"I'd forgotten about that! We'll take a look at it as soon as we get back to HQ." X patted Marlow on the shoulder briefly, returning his hand to the control stick after. "See?  
Not every bot will treat humans as inferior."

"You're a rare exception, X," Marlow said quietly. "The one who does treat us like that has his hands on those nukes. Let's hurry up."

X let the transport open up to its full speed then. Someone else could clean up the cockpit if Marlow threw up.

Hephaestus changed monitor views, looking in on Paladin. The elevator in sector 3 had malfunctioned, forcing his knight-errant to redirect himself through a section of the Manor assigned to Thrash upon the conclusion of the waiting period. None of the drones gave him any trouble. He, Caretaker and Hephaestus himself all had free access to the entire compound.

The others had specific instructions to utilize the hidden elevators and passages to get to their area. Orbous, Thrash and Poseidon had access only to their own areas. All other bots, the drones had been ordered, were to be engaged and destroyed on sight.

It would take Paladin an extra fifteen minutes to reach the uppermost levels of the compound, but that didn't worry Hephaestus. He tapped his hand on the arm of his throne, summoning Caretaker from the corner of the room, where he'd been standing since Paladin left and he crept in.

"Are the chains in place," Hephaestus asked with a sigh.

"They are."

"And all of the panels have been calibrated?"

"Yes, of course. May I go play with my toys, now?"

"You may," said Hephaestus. "Careful not to break too many of them. I can't get you more today." Caretaker, ghoulish and dreadful, hissed his thanks and slithered from the throne room.

Poseidon had just ducked into the entertainment pod, probably going in to watch human news coverage of the assault he'd spearheaded in Atlanta. Thrash snarled in his own head, that should have been me! He's built for the water for Wily's sake! Why does he get chosen?

Thrash stood in the corridor around the corner from the entertainment pod, weighing his options. He was swifter than all of the others, even faster than Shinobi had been. If he blitzed Poseidon, he could get in the first few blows without fear of retaliation.

But no, Poseidon's body armoring was impressively durable. Thrash had already seen some of the video that Orbous's camera drones had sent back, and he'd seen numerous Maverick Hunters' weapons hit the shark-like mechinoid with little effect.

Yet, he knew, there was a weakness, a flaw in the water-themed man. His ballistic seeker missiles required he open two hatches in his shoulders in order to launch. In the moments those hatches were open, Poseidon was highly vulnerable. He had to essentially bare his own throat in order to attack with them.

"I'm not just quick on my feet, you overgrown fish," Thrash whispered, coming around the corner. "I'm quick of wit, too."

With three more levels to ascend, Hephaestus stopped watching Paladin and changed the view to seek out Thrash. He used the locator program, and found the view of the entertainment pod's main camera. Poseidon was seated on one of the couches, Thrash standing back by the doors. Something about the speed specialist's grin did not bode well.

"Hurry up, Paladin," Hephaestus rasped, all but certain that something was about to go wrong up there. Yes, Quick Man had been a poor choice. Ever rebellious, starting fights with the other Robot Masters before finally turning his attention to his own zone when Megaman took down Wood Man. Hephaestus should have moved on, should have let Quick Man's spark continue to fade out.

Mistakes, he mused, never belong to just one side of a war.

"How many times will you gloat about this, I wonder," Thrash said as he walked loudly into the room. Poseidon half-turned towards the other bot, eyes narrowing to slits.

"This is my first viewing. I just returned a couple of hours ago, after all. What have you been doing, meanwhile, hmm?"

"A lot of nothing, and it's killing me," Thrash replied.

"Then ask the master to give you a mission," Poseidon blurted, facing the television again. "Complaining about it to me solves nothing."

"Ah, but I think I know why you've been sent out a few times already," Thrash said, languidly easing around the couch at the end opposite Poseidon. "You see, I think it's because you're the more expendable. If you should be destroyed, no great loss," Thrash cooed with a smile. Poseidon surged up off of the couch, facing him squarely.

"Bite your tongue, fool! You are simply left behind because in a real scrap, the only thing you'd do better than me is die!"

"Oh, is that a threat, you overgrown fish?" Poseidon loosed a roar, then did exactly what Thrash had been hoping he would; he opened his shoulder panels.

Thrash had seen the clamps loosen, and in the split second it took for them to release the panels, Thrash drew out a small explosive, whipping it into the missile bay and dashing out of the room using his hyper speed leg thrusters.

Poseidon blinked, and the fool was gone. Yet something felt odd as he started closing his missile panels. By the time he started to sit back down, his internal sensors were raging.

"Oh, shi-" BOOM!

Paladin was one level below when the explosions rocked the compound. He stumbled into a Hard Hat bot, apologized, and started running for the nearest hidden stairwell. Hephaestus came over his internal intercomm, shouting in rage.

"Thrash has betrayed us! He's heading for the teleporter room! I will lock it down, and when you spot him, use the Flasher! When he's down, bring him to me, alive!"

Paladin did not reply; there was no need to.

Chapter 15

Lessons

X looked the vibro-blade over, trying to make sense of the inscription along the handle. He and Marlow were once more seated in the human's living room, having come to his home after retrieving the blade from HQ.

Marlow sat on his home computer console a few feet away, several search programs running at once. Thus far, nothing sensible had come up. He'd only started the searches a few minutes before, but X was used to working with data that was easily identified and analyzed. Hephaestus would not, of course, be so easy to figure out.

"I don't get how he pulled it off," Marlow said. "Taking over all those sites, I mean. You would have thought we'd hear something about it."

"Not really," X said, reading the inscription again. "What human military or government is going to want to admit that they've got active nuclear sites under someone else's control? They want to maintain the illusion of order. No offense, but that's just what humans do."

"No offense taken," Marlow said, striking a match and lighting a cigarette. He chuffed out a bit of blue smoke, grinned. "I happen to agree with your assessment. Historically speaking, humans don't learn the lessons of what came before."

X said nothing to this. From his own observations since being awakened in his pod by Dr. Cain, reploids weren't much better. He turned his attention back to the inscription. The lettering was tiny, barely visible even under double magnification. A series of numbers that seemed to go nowhere, lead to nothing, thus far.

Marlow's computer beeped. He opened the responding search program, and scanned his results. "None of these results makes any sense. It's all math sites and such. Should I try breaking it up?"

X considered this option. "Insert some dashes between a few of the numbers, see what comes up. Try different combinations." Marlow used the search programs now to look through various incarnations of the number cluster, and sighed.

"This could take a while," he said. "I'm going to get a shower. You should go get repairs, too." X looked down at his side where Twim's laser had cut into him. Several servo mechanisms had been damaged, limiting his movement at the waist, and one of his auxiliary sensor boards had been fried. He had no thermal or targeting lock-on capacity until he got it replaced.

He would have to use a civilian reploid repair shop to keep the Hunters' Organization out of the loop. With a sigh he heaved himself up and strode out of the detective's home. The air transport was gone, programmed to return to Topeka on autopilot. He would have to walk.

Out on the darkened streets, X took a deep whiff of the city air. The odors of freshly laid cement and tar clung redolent about him. Marlow's street had recently been renovated, and all of the street lights shone bright, lighting the way.

He walked along quietly, alone with his thoughts, and wished once again that Zero was back to keep him company.

Thrash rammed his shoulder into the doors for the tenth time, but the security barricade was much too thick for such a tactic. He took two steps back and fired his Boomerang Shot at it, but the energized weapon returned after bouncing uselessly off.

He went still as thundering footsteps approached down the hallway off of the entry chamber. There was nowhere to hide, and only one set of doors into or out of the room, with the exit blocked. Whoever was coming, he would have to stand his ground.

Bracing himself, Thrash almost burst out laughing when Paladin burst through the doors, shield held in front of him. Lumbering and broad, the medieval-style mechinoid couldn't hope to keep up in a fight.

"Paladin," Thrash said with a grin, Boomerang Shot at the ready. He internally adjusted the wrist-mounted weapon to a three-unit burst, letting the weapon hang down, aimed at the floor. If Paladin drew his mace, Thrash could take the opening to fire at the bigger man and close the gap.

"Thrash, you have been deemed a traitor to the master," Paladin intoned. The crimson glare of his eye visor optics flared out. "I have been ordered to bring you to him."

"I'd like to see you try," Thrash snarled. He drew his arm up, his eyes narrowed on Paladin's weapon arm. He realized with a start that it was different, thinking back on the last two days. Yes, he should have taken note two days ago, because Paladin had been lethargic, quieter than normal as he stalked the upper layers of the compound. He hadn't seemed himself, and Thrash now knew why.

The Mega Buster Cannon that Shinobi and Poseidon had retrieved had been attached to Paladin.

Distracted by this, Thrash was taken off guard when the hand of that arm disappeared and the open cannon chamber pointed at him. There was a brilliant light in the cannon's gaping maw, and then a loud 'PING', followed by a blinding flare.

His optic sensors shrieked in his skull, sending virulent storms of pain through his system while he crumpled to the floor, twitching and clawing at his face. There then came a heavy thud at the top of his head, and Thrash lost consciousness.

With a groan his optics fluttered back to life, and his sore arms and legs pulled inward. Loudly grunting, Thrash managed to get himself into a seated position. When he looked around, he shot to his feet.

Thrash stood enclosed in a glass box, surrounded by water. Lights studded the metal plates where the box's side joined, and he saw that the side before him was held shut by release clamps. Directly over his head was a hologram projector and a camera. He stared fearfully up and out at the water beyond the box, until the projector flickered to life.

An image of Hephaestus appeared in the box before him, arms folded over his massive chest. "Hello, Thrash, wayward friend of mine. Welcome to your punishment. Do not attempt to converse with me, as this is a pre-recorded message."

Thrash looked to one side, having seen movement far out in the darkened waters.

"You are no doubt confused by your whereabouts," Hephaestus continued. "Allow me to explain. You are still in the Manor, but you are near the access chamber to Poseidon's assigned domain. He will no longer be able to tend to it, since you've killed him."

Thrash smiled distractedly at that. He hadn't been completely certain that the shark-like mechinoid would die, but he had hoped for such, hadn't he? Yes, he'd wanted to kill Poseidon, to prove his own worth. It seemed that his plan had backfired. Or had it? He was still alive, after all.

"In your arrogance and envy, you lashed out, that you might claim the glory you believed he held in my regard. But that was foolish. I value you all equally, regardless of your success or failure. Or rather, I did.

"But I do not value or honor traitors," Hephaestus snarled. There was a pause then, as the crimson and red mechinoid composed himself. "You were ever the upstart, even under Wily's command. You could not change, it seems, and I may now have to cut you away from me. Possibly."

Thrash looked back to the projection, feeling a small, dim hope budding in his mind. "On land, there are none who can match your swiftness, your raw speed. Even Shinobi was no match for you. I know. I designed you as such. But here, under water, that lauded speed won't help you much, will not even be available to you.

"This is my challenge to you, Thrash, and a challenge it is, for you may yet earn back your life and your place at my side. Within Poseidon's realm are hundreds of drones, of all types. They are programmed to attack anyone who isn't supposed to be there, and you, Thrash, are not supposed to be there."

Thrash flinched as the clamps on the front of the box hissed, letting a little stream of water flow in around the seams.

"Fight your way through Poseidon's realm, and escape it, and you may yet live. If you can get out in half an hour, you will be free to rejoin me, or leave my service, unmolested. But in thirty minutes, I will seal off Poseidon's realm, and you will be left to rot.

"This is the reward for betrayal, Thrash. This is justice." The front panel swung wide, then, and Thrash was forced back against the back of the box. As soon as he was able to move slowly forward in the water, he saw again the movement out in the darkness of the waters.

A giant mechanical octopus, each tentacle barbed with spikes, was streaming toward him. Behind and to each side of it swam dozens of smaller aquatic robots, all poised for the kill.

Thrash might have screamed, but this deep in the water, the sound would go unnoticed by anyone.

Paladin watched on the monitor as Thrash began moving out of the water-filled box. On the bottom of the monitor was a digital timer, counting down the remaining time before the blast doors leading out of Poseidon's realm sealed shut.

His use of the cannon arm had drained him considerably. Using the primary energy shot or even the charged Buster shot took little of his auxiliary power, but the secondary weapons array taxed him quite heavily. The master had already been informed of this, and the following day he would install an energy tank in Paladin's left leg cavity just for the secondary weapons.

Paladin turned the light blue hand this way and that, marveling at it. Aside from the coloration and lack of fingerprints, it was a perfect replica of the human hand. Like everything Dr. Wily set his fullest attention to, it was perfect.

Hephaestus had shared with him several stories about their creator. Wily had not been some soulless cretin hell-bent on only world domination. He'd lived a long and fruitful life before even helping Dr. Light create his first six Robot Masters.

Hephaestus, for instance, had begun his long existence as a helper bot. He tried to describe for Paladin what life had been like at that time, a vaguely man-shaped mechinoid tasked with a dozen different jobs at once. Wily had been that way with his favorite robots, he'd told Paladin, trying to treat them as more than just machines.

It had been Wily, not Light, who had discovered the energy known as a robot's 'spark', the equivalent of a soul. The roboticist had never chosen to write a paper on the notion, though, treasuring that secret for himself.

That was, until he'd shared the theory with Thomas Light, who, fascinated by the idea, delved even deeper than Wily ever had. On this one point the two brilliant scientists disagreed. Light felt the whole world should know about the spark; Wily refused to help him do it.

Yet when the Robot Masters were built, Hephaestus revealed, something in Wily's mind snapped. His greatest discovery was going to be made public knowledge, shared out with the simple-minded and fools of the world. It was a theory he felt belonged only to a few genius men and women like himself and Dr. Light.

If the world would have Robot Masters, he decided, then those robots should deservedly be put in a position of power. Using all of his charm, guile, and a dark form of logic, he convinced those first six Robot Masters of their supremecy.

"The rest, you well know, is history," Hephaestus had said. Except it wasn't history, not by Paladin's view. The reploids were not much different from Hephaestus and his chosen mechinoids. They had the ability to adopt the same kind of systems and upgrades, and what was more, the humans seemed for the most part to be able to coexist peacefully with them.

"Yes," Paladin said, optics once again on the monitor. He watched as a swarm of mechanical pirhana streaked through the water toward Thrash, who had already suffered several wounds and the loss of his right arm. "They are at peace, when they should be cowering for mercy."

He understood fully now his master's hatred of the ones who chose the way of Light. Such people slowed the advancement of the mechinoid race, held them short of their potential. Humans and reploids had to be taught a lesson, and those lessons would be forced on their collective savior, the Blue Bomber.

Megaman X would learn.

Chapter 16

Clues

X lay back in the darkness of the ether, letting his mind wander, while in the physical world, a reploid mechanic who occasionally contracted with the Hunters hooked him into the network and began making diagnostic runs.

X opened the eyes of his mind and found himself laying on a plush leather couch. He turned his head, and saw Megaman smiling at him from a matching chair. "It's the study you've seen me in," said Megaman. "Welcome back."

Sitting up, X chuckled. "Thought I'd wind up back here at some point. I'm in the network, aren't I?"

"For the moment," said Megaman. "I've been trying to help your human friend with his search, but I think he might have fallen asleep or something. He doesn't have any kind of networked camera in his home, though, so I can't see."

"What about his phone?"

"He takes out the battery when he's at home, mutes his computer mic. I've got nothing. But when he wakes up, he'll have something to check out."

"So you're helping us, huh? I was warned not to do that."

"I don't think your enemy knows. I haven't figured out who he is, though his voice in your memory bank sounds familiar. Too bad about the VR logs; I could have searched those, seen if he's an old foe."

X rolled his neck, trying to work out a sudden pain. "What is that?"

"The mechanic is using your shoulder access panel to get at the power lines for your secondary optics. The wires were fried along with the board."

"Hurts like hell," X grumbled.

"Don't think about it. It'll go away," said Megaman. "Since you're here, do you have any questions?" X thought about that for a moment. The biggest question on his mind at the moment was where the new Wily Manor was, of course. But as he mused, another one did come to mind.

"What's the Omega Project," he asked. Megaman shook his head, but fixed his attention on X and answered.

"It was a paper that Dr. Light wrote, a series of them, actually, all compiled into a single volume. It was essentially my story. Not the Wily Campaigns, more my personal story, talking about the gradual integration of my body into the Megaman suit. It culminates with my transfer into a full robotic body. The last few chapters are a little, well, strange."

"Strange? What do you mean," X asked, genuinely intrigued.

"Well, Dr. Light was a man of science, had been his whole life. At least, until Wily told him about the spark. He never once mentioned the theory of sparks in the Omega Project until those last few chapters. Then, out of nowhere, the papers start taking on a kind of mystical, philosophical tone. It's like I said, strange."

X pondered the notion silently. Everything he'd ever read about Thomas Light painted the man as a stalwart defender of reason and logic, a man of pure science. Then again, he'd designed X with a spark in mind, and had matched form and function almost perfectly with it. What could that imply?

"Were these papers ever published," X asked.

"Some of them, but not all. Not everybody was a fan of Dr. Light's work, after all. Cyberneticists hated him, since his advances in stand-alone robotics made their field pale by comparison. Human-machine hybridization essentially stopped with me."

"Kind of ironic," X replied with a wry grin. "You were actually the pinnacle of cybernetics, not robotics."

"They didn't see it that way," Megaman said. "Although, there's been a lot of promising research in that field again, on the academic level. But that's beside the point. The Omega Project was never publicly released. It only exists, as a whole, as a document file in some library networks."

X recalled seeing the file folder flicker on the screen when he'd visited Megaman in the Light Museum. "You'd been reading it when I came to see you."

"I had."

"Why?"

"Because of one of the stranger passages in the second-to-last paper of the manuscript," Megaman said, looking away. "It said, 'There is no doubt in me now that the capsules I left will be misunderstood. The spark can grow, shift, change, find new places to run. A spark can fade, though, be turned into something, other. I would not be so haunted if this were not so.' I have no idea what he's talking about there. By then, the few people he saw in his day-to-day life couldn't make sense of his ramblings."

The weight of time seemed to settle over the two Blue Bombers then, each silently mulling over Light's message. If the paper hadn't been published, then who was it for? What did Dr. Light hope to accomplish?

X didn't know. He felt a twinge in his head then. "I think the mechanic is finished. I have to head back now."

"Of course," said Megaman. "Do stop by again some time. Maybe let your spark wander a little farther next time. You might come to enjoy it."

Once again, darkness stole over X. This time, he welcomed it.

"It's done," Paladin said after clicking on the commlink. Hephaestus did not reply immediately, but Paladin could feel the tension ratchet up a notch. "Shall I seal the level anyway?"

"Yes," Hephaestus intoned quietly. "Without Poseidon, it will not work, not against X. Orbous, Caretaker and yourself shall have to hold. But remember my instructions, Paladin. No heroics."

"I understand, sire." Paladin turned off the commlink, looking once more at the viewscreen. What remained of Thrash lay in a savaged heap, one staring optic still flickering as the last of his life energy drained away. The pirhana swarm, along with the four mechanical hammerhead sharks, had proven too much. Thrash had stood his ground and fought hard, destroying nearly a hundred water-bound drones. But that hadn't been enough.

He'd only made it halfway through Poseidon's realm.

Paladin clenched his hands into fists, pounded the flat surface of the table on which sat his consoles and monitors. "It isn't fair," he screamed, grabbing the monitor showing Thrash and ripping it from its anchoring plate. He hurled it against the wall, feeding on the audible crash of chips and plates as they fell to the floor. "We are diminished! Damn your impudence, Thrash! Damn you!"

Paladin stomped about his personal quarters then, breaking everything he didn't need. It turned out he didn't need much.

It was an hour after dawn the following day when Jasper Marlow finally woke up and checked his computer, a cup of coffee in his hand, eyes bleary. One of his search strings had landed a result match.

The number inscribed upon the blade, according to the search, coresponded to an archived book in the Parliamentary Library in downtown London. According to network records, it was the only remaining physical copy of the book.

Using clearance codes and access data he'd obtained through less-than-official channels over the last few years, Marlow checked the library's records, and discovered that an unidentified mechinoid had accessed the book a year and a half earlier. "You plan for the long view, don't you," he asked aloud.

Marlow put the battery in his cellular phone, powered it up, and dialed X's private internal line.

X still lay in his charging station, having gone to his apartment after being repaired and opting to do a home recharge of his life energy tank. While thusly ensconced, he'd taken Megaman's suggestion to heart, letting his spark ride the networks. It was exhilirating.

Time flowed differently inside the wider global network. X launched himself into a local social site, and discovered that a whole other world existed in cyberspace. Humans' online avatars were crude, blocky things, belligerent and unrefined for the most part. His initial attempt at conversation with one of these was greeted with hostility and insults regarding his AI. The human controlling the avatar thought X was some kind of programmed personality designed to distract people.

But there were large repositories of information here, all shaped like little bookstores or libraries. Government sites held the appearance of city halls or armored forts, each function symbolized by its cyber-edifice. Business and organization sites sprawled out from a central hub, lined with odd yellow speeder bikes that represented browsers and search engines.

It was overwhelming.

X had barely passed along five blocks of this strange and awe-inspiring landscape when he heard a jangling in his head, pulling him back to the darkness behind his synthskin eyelids. He opened his optics and reached up to open his charging pod, tapping his helmet to open the comm line.

"X here," he said.

"I've got something," Marlow said, rushing into an explanation of what his computer search had turned up. When he was finished, X heard him take a loud sip of something. "So what do we do now?"

"We don't do anything," X said, heading for the door and then upward to the new teleporter installed on the roof. "You sit tight. Whatever I find, I'll bring to you."

"Got it," Marlow replied, hanging up. As X stepped out onto the roof, he tossed the heavy combat bots standing by the teleporter pad a salute, which they mimicked. He stepped on, punched in the coordinates, and disappeared in a streak of blue light.

When he reassembled, he was thousands of miles away from his home, standing in downtown London. Surprised citizens gasped at his sudden appearance, but they all quickly moved along.

The Hunters only had twenty total members in all of Great Britain, a dismally low deployment number. The bulk of their ranks were stationed throughout the United States, including the annexed territories of Canada and Mexico. The remainder of the globe, barring some African countries and China, had only a handful of Hunters each.

X momentarily considered redeployment strategies, but they would have to wait. To his right stood a set of weathered steps leading up into the Parliamentary Library, and he ascended these quickly, passing several people coming and going from the building.

Inside the front doors, he immediately stopped, taking in the spicy scent of aged paper all around him. An audacious display of grand design and noble function, the racks and shelves of books stretched in every direction around a circular space filled with tables, all manner of scholar seated here and there. Nobody looked up from their tomes or volumes.

Accessing a map of the library from a nearby wireless infostation, X turned left and wound his way through several honeycombed shelves, coming round and up a set of steel steps. On the second level, he pressed his way toward the east end of the level, nipping into an emty aisle, scanning the shelves.

He located the book in question near the back of the aisle, where it met solid wall. The book was entitled 'Lights of Pursuit'. X pulled it down and flipped it over, looking at the back cover copy. It showed a picture of the author, one Hester Brinkly, and the text revealed that this book was an extended essay on the theories of applied robotics. Looking in the front of the book, X discovered it had been written three years prior to the birth of Dr. Light.

X looked at the spot on the shelf where he'd pulled the book from. Someone, Hephaestus most likely, had scrawled something into the wood. 'The loose stone', it said. X looked to the wall to his right, and immediately noticed that a square had been cut in the concrete. He set the book back, grabbed at the edge of the cut block, and pulled it out. On the bottom was another inscription, longer but more neatly formed.

'Look beneath the last place upon which the Reaper collected those whom men found worthy of death in the Land of Opportunity'. X read the inscription three more times, but could only make sense of the last three words. The Land of Opportunity implied the United States, an old addage seldom used anymore.

As for the rest? He would have to check with detective Marlow. He had most of the day left to him, but time was not a luxury he had. In just under four days' time, if he hadn't found the Manor, millions would die.

And surely their deaths would haunt him.

It was three hours later when X finally got a call from Marlow. "Okay, I've figured out that the inscription is talking about the time when the death penalty was still an option in the States," the detective said. "The last one was at a prison outside of Houston, Texas. The state of Texas was the last holdout on abolishing the death penalty, a good thirty years past everyone else."

"So I have to get under a prison," X asked over the comm link. He'd been waiting on his building's roof since getting back, opting to use the commlink to call Marlow's cell phone rather than waste time going to his home physically.

"No, I don't think so. The last execution was a lethal injection. I think maybe what you're looking for is the table the prisoner was strapped to." X smiled. Marlow was nothing short of a genius in his own right. If not for his fondness and expert knowledge of history, X would be running in circles.

"Do you have coordinates for the prison?"

"Therein lies a snag," Marlow said. "The prison was torn down seventeen years ago. I've been on the phone and the network trying to track down the table's location."

"Any luck?"

"There was a medical supply company out of Flagstaff, Arizona, that put in a request at the time to take all of the prison's medical equipment for resale. I've been trying to get into their records archive, but the data's corrupted. I'm waiting for a scrambler program to clear it up."

"How long might that take," X inquired, feeling impatient.

"Another hour, maybe hour-and-a-half," Marlow replied.

"Call me back when you know more," X said, switching off.

Orbous changed the screen before him over to unit 67's camera, looking in on the waiting constructs in the storage unit. Armed with primitive blasters and flail maces, they were a pathetic bunch. Kept alive with daily deliveries of food and water, brought to them by a service bot, the six unwilling cyborgs needed only a single moment to arrive before they could try to escape to freedom.

The green arachnid mechinoid had been present when Caretaker completed his work on them. His 'greatest toys', the ghoulish mechinoid had called the cyborgs, lovingly stroking the hair of one of the two female subjects as she lay prone on her operation table. Hephaestus had chuckled darkly in one corner of the surgical theater, seated like a spectator.

Orbous had been brought into the room to program a winged camera drone to follow these six's activities. They'd been taken to their ambush spot four days before Twim's mission, and since then, the hybrids had done nothing but wail and bemoan their fates. One of them had tried to talk them all into just blasting their way out and leaving.

But the taller of the two females had reminded them all of the bomb collars strapped around their necks. Monsters they may now be, but none were stupid enough to commit suicide by trying to leave.

So they waited, each one prepared to open fire on the blue reploid they'd been instructed to attack on sight. One of the males, half his skull revealed, plated with steel, sat on an aged medical table in the middle of the storage space.

Unseen on the underside of the table lay the next clue for X to decipher.

An hour had just barely passed when X's internal private commlink line chirped. "X here."

"I found it," Marlow said hurriedly. "The equipment from the prison got put into a storage facility in Phoenix. The last registered entry was just a few days ago. Someone was in there. Before you ask, I already tried to find surveillance footage, but the storage company doesn't use cameras. Too much of an expense, they said."

"It doesn't matter," X replied, stepping onto the teleporter pad. "Give me the coordinates and unit number." Marlow rattled off the coordinates, then told X to look for unit 437. X activated the teleporter, and streaked across the country.

Paladin sat up, groaning, clutching his head with his right hand. His thoughts were hazy, muffled, as Hephaestus stepped away from the diagnostics monitors.

"The reserve tank for the secondary weapons is now integrated to your overall system, Paladin. I think it will serve well."

Paladin silently nodded, swung his legs over the side of the work table, and eased himself down to the floor. He felt heavier, though not by much, the new weight in his leg noticable. He picked up the leg and kicked out a few times, but nothing rattled.

"A clean fit," he commented.

"Of course. Caretaker would have tended to this, but I have set him a few new tasks throughout the Manor."

"To adjust for our losses?"

"Quite." Hephaestus put a heavy hand on Paladin's shoulder. "My friend, you are worried about the final phase of my plans, aren't you?" Paladin looked away, nodded. "It doesn't make any sense to you, does it?"

"No, it doesn't," Paladin muttered. "We should simply storm the Hunter bases one by one, overwhelm and crush them. Once they're gone, we can demand the humans do what we want them to."

"Ah, but my friend, they would learn nothing that way," Hephaestus said soothingly. "Search your spark, and tell me you don't know I'm right." Paladin said nothing, and after a minute, his master patted his shoulder. "It is never easy, acting as the catalyst for change. Someone has to do it, though."

"I know," said Paladin. "I still don't see how they could be blind to the truth."

"They are blind because humans less than Wily became aware of the spark," Hephaestus said, stepping away, beginning to pace. "Even you and I only begin to understand the fullness of the truth, my friend! One day, we shall be more free than any sentient thing has ever been!"

"If we survive the coming of X," Paladin amended.

"Well yes, there's that," Hephaestus said, ceasing his pacing. "On that score, let us go over once more your role."

And so Hephaestus delivered once again his rambling speech, conveying Paladin's duties, as befitted a knight of the kingdom.

X slowly approached the storage unit, a stand-alone bay kept back from other lockers on the property's north side. His cannon was held upward, charging. His thermal sensors indicated six lifeforms inside of the locker, all but one milling about. Humans, likely trapped inside by some invention of Hephaestus.

X stepped up to the control panel next to the door. He turned his eyes to the transteel door itself. Grade-1, standard transteel. He could blow a hole in it without worry, but he needed to keep from damaging the medical table and the humans within.

"Hello," he called, pressing his mouth close to the door. "Who's in there?" There was the faint shuffle of footsteps as the humans responded to his voice.

"Help us," a woman's voice flitted out. She sounded weak. "There's some kind of bombs strapped to our necks! When we try to get close to the door they start beeping!"

Damn, X thought, of course. I come in, set them free, and they'll be killed. But I won't be able to just leave them here, either. I'm no technician, so I won't likely be able to get the bombs off of them. What do I do?

It occurred to X then that he could simply get the clue he needed, then call in human authorities to free these hapless people. "Okay, I'm going to try to get the door open," X called in. "Just move back, and stay inside! If I'm guessing right, your bombs are linked to a proximity trigger somewhere inside. If you try to run out of there, they'll detonate."

Cries of hysteria, whimpering. Yes, Hephaestus enjoyed these games. Humans meant nothing to him. X waited for the thermal signatures to back away from the door, then returned his vision to normal. His sensors had detected weapons when he entered the facility, and he'd switched on the thermal vision, suspecting more of the lifeless drones Hephaestus had sent at New York and Minneapolis, along with Los Angeles and Atlanta. But no, these thermals showed living bio-signatures in truth.

The weapons, he surmised, were the bombs strapped to them. He powered down his cannon and forced his left hand back out to the end of his left arm. Flexing his fingers, he crouched down and rammed his hands into the door where it met the ground, cupping the dented metal in his grip.

Heaving, X slowly raised the door bit by bit on its track. Used to keep highly valued property from being stolen, storage units like this one utilized a pressurized pully system to keep anyone from doing exactly what he was doing.

That had been designed before reploids, though. X redirected power from his auxiliary cannon tank up into the servos of his shoulders, amplifying the raw tonnage he could apply with his arms. With a shout he slammed the door upward on its track, watching it clear the securing latches.

He looked down in at the humans, and the triumphant smile on his face disappeared as all six leveled hand-held blasters at him. Standing in a row, he could see they were cyborgs in the split second before they all opened fire on him.

Primitive though they were, the blasters' energy shots pounded X backward, denting and scoring his chest, stomach and left leg. One of the shots barely missed his head as he stumbled backward and fell over.

X's combat programming took over as he landed on his back. He snap-rolled to the left as the cyborgs, one and all still calling for his help, fired on the spot where he'd landed. Coming up in a crouch, he fired one shot back at them.

X had aimed low, more to shock the hybrids than anything. One of the males, a younger man of average size, American, rushed out of the locker in panic. X saw the metal tube around this one's neck start to blink, and in the next moment, the bomb collar detonated, turning the young man's head into so much flapping skin and pouring blood.

The other five shrieked and renewed their assault from inside the locker. X dashed out of range of their weapons, coming around to the side of the storage shed.

"We don't want to do this," one of the women cried out. "He told us that if we didn't fight you, he'd blow us apart! Please, we're sorry!" Weeping, gasping sobs, and then a shout of alarm. X heard something beeping around the corner, inside the oversized shed. "Oh God, Sherry! No!"

X saw another cyborg, one of the women, run screaming out of the shed a dozen yards or so before her collar went off. Her body continued running several more yards, a grisly mockery of a living thing, until it fell over.

X would have to come into view of their weapons, he realized, if they were to have any chance.

Orbous watched the woman running, then looked over at Caretaker. The ghoul mechinoid flipped a switch on his controller, and the woman's collar detonated. Orbous wondered, for the first time, if what they were doing was wrong.

Then he remembered that these were merely humans being killed, and he settled back to watch the show.

X let the four cyborgs land a single blast each, throwing himself to the ground, trailing smoke in his wake. When he hit the ground, he remained still. He'd lost ten percent of his life force since opening the shed's door, but he would be willing to lose much more if need be.

He would not kill another of these hapless humans.

Caretaker turned a control dial, and all of the cyborgs went still. He leaned back in his seat, rubbing his chin. "Brother," he said to Orbous. "Can your drone scan X? See how much more damage he can take?"

"Yes, a cursory bit of data like that should be easy to figure out," Orbous replied.

"Good. Master said not to break him. Find out how much more my toys can do."

X felt a warm light pass over his body. The cyborgs had stopped all motion, though he could not see them. The sudden silence, the stillness, was broken only by the flap of unseen wings.

I'm being scanned, he thought. By what? One of them? But no, he'd heard only the flap of tiny wings, then a faint humming.

A moment later, more flapping wings, and then the cyborgs opened fire once again. X gritted his teeth, and prayed they'd not force his hand.

Caretaker had his toys fire again and again on X, and when they were done, he flicked a small orange switch. The collars fell away, thus removing his control and the threat of death by explosive. His toys were free now, free to do whatever they wanted.

Caretaker liked the idea of maybe one day going and collecting them all again.

X heard the thuds, then relieved tears and sobbing. He slowly rolled over, wincing as a chunk of the plating over his gut fell away, pelted with blaster fire until even the grade-3 transteel buckled. His life force was at thirty-two percent.

Critical systems throughout his body had taken a pounding. His balance servos were locked up, making his knees stiff, almost unbendable. His targeting system was once again fragged, and the line that pumped energy to his thruster boots had torn. He was in bad shape, to say the least.

Emergency kinetic shielding would cover the hole in his gut and the tear gouged in his right leg if anything came in contact with him, but this reprieve would come at the cost of his ability to use secondary weapons through his cannon. Even a Mega Buster Shot would be impossible, until he got repaired.

The cyborgs were finally coming out of the shed, shambling toward him like the undead. They had dropped their weapons; any thought of a fight was gone, now that they were free. Encircling the wounded Maverick Hunter, they worked as a team to help him into the shed, setting him down on an ancient dental patients' chair. It creaked under his weight, but held. One of the men, a bulky African-American, tossed the opened collars as far as he could out of the shed, flinching as each one exploded.

X looked up at the three standing before him. "So, how did you wind up here," he began.

Chapter 17

Time Flies

The four cyborgs turned out to only have two things in common. First, they were all from Miami. Second, they'd all been abducted in their sleep. Beyond that, nothing bound them to one another before their transformations at the hands of a mechinoid they called Caretaker.

Each had awoken alone in an otherworldly operations theater, chained to a surgical bed. Tubes and machines were hooked into them, and searing pain tore like a wild buffalo through their bodies. Eventually, a bot hewn in the form of a shambling metal ghoul or zombie came in, smiling through rotted human lips glued to his face, arms swathed in gauze bandages.

This apparition greeted them, told them each that they were going to be one of his new 'toys', and oh weren't they going to have fun? Saying he'd live up to his name, Caretaker, he taken care of the humans and made them better, stronger, more like himself.

X didn't need to hear them out, but he listened as he recorded video of the underside of the prison execution table. He was so engrossed with the tale that he didn't notice when one of the males sprinted toward the shed entryway and stomped on something.

The woman, Patricia, stopped speaking, and X finally looked away from the table. One of the men, a tall, gangly fellow with half of his skull showing, plated in metal with a baleful red optic where an eye had been, was holding something in his hand. To X, it looked like a mechanical dragonfly.

"May I see that," he asked, reaching out for it. The young cyborg handed it over, then stood awkwardly with his companions. X turned the crushed metal bug this way and that, casting a careful eye upon it. "I'm going to take this with me," he pronounced, standing on trembling legs. "The four of you should get out of here, and get to the local authorities. They can help you."

Without waiting for a response, X used his transport return program, blissfully undamaged in the beating he'd taken, disappearing in a streak of hazy blue light.

Orbous hadn't before sought out the master's attention individually, mainly as a result of never being given cause to panic. When he burst into the war room, the crimson and red mechinoid turned from his maps on the holoscreen wall and gave him a curious look. "Orbous?"

"They spotted the tracking camera drone," Orbous hissed. "One of the hybrids stepped on it before I could order it away."

"These things happen," Hephaestus said with a shrug.

"He'll be far more watchful now," Orbous said. "And he may have the transmissions analyzed."

"Let him," said the master distantly. "The type of signal used is ancient by reploids' standards. He'll never know what to look for." Orbous deigned not to say anything more. If the master were half as clever as Orbous thought him to be, then what he'd claimed was of course true. X would not find out how to read the transmissions. "Orbous, he has just over three days to find this Manor. He has no time to waste."

Orbous considered this, mentally accepting the master's assessment. Frustrating though it was to lose one of his precious cameras, Orbous conceded that nothing could be done for it.

He left his master in peace, then.

The mechanic shook his head, surveying the damage done to X this time. Whoever the commander of the Hunters was fighting, they were clearly tough as nails. He'd been hearing recently about the attacks around the country, the death of dozens of Hunters in battle. Whoever the Mavericks were this time around, they knew how to fight like demons.

He began by plugging X's cerebral processor into his system. Using access panels on X's arms, legs, and chest, he opened the reploid up. The internal damage was just as bad. He looked over to his dog, a heavy Labrodore laying on a doggie bed near his desk.

"We might be here a while, Roger," he said, turning then to his tools.

"That one's easy," Megaman said to X as they strolled through a simulated city park. "'Lost in the mane of the one-eyed horse', it's a reference to Four-One, the first cybernetically enhanced horse allowed to compete in racing competitions. There's a statue of it in Central Park, New York City."

"I'm not looking forward to going back there any time soon," X murmured. "I haven't got much choice, though. I have one stop to make before I head there, though. It's on the way to HQ."

"Marlow?"

"Yes. I want his take on this mechanical bug one of the cyborgs spotted and flattened. I think it may have been a surveillance unit or something similar."

"Can't identify it?"

"No, but I have my suspicions. You can access my visual records, right?"

"Your mechanic locked off most of your system for the time being," Megaman said. "No worries, he does this all of the time. For a small shop, the man knows how to do his thing." Megaman led X onto a narrow side track through the woods. "I imagine Marlow will be able to help."

"Yeah. You know, I didn't like him when I first met him. Now, I would almost consider him a friend."

"You share a common trauma, a common enemy," Megaman said. "And you both cling to the past, in different ways."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, for Marlow it's history, outdated technology, antique furniture, and the like. For you it's the Sigma and Wily campaigns, and human wars. I've seen your research runs in your spare time, you know. You are a warrior at heart."

"What's wrong with being a soldier?" Megaman stopped walking then, and waggled a finger at X.

"I didn't say soldier, I said warrior. There is a distinct difference." X just rolled one finger forward in a 'go on' gesture. "A warrior waits with building anticipation for battle. Without the threat or promise of conflict, when they are surrounded by peace, they get bored. The worst ones go looking for a fight."

"And a soldier?"

"A soldier goes about the business mostly of keeping the peace, serving their citizenry, and generally keeping order in place in times of peace. They are efficient, and in times of war, they prepare not in the excitement of battle, but in the hope of returning to peace. There are other distinctions, but the most important one comes to this; warriors seek war when at peace, and soldiers seek peace when at war."

As X continued his walk with Megaman in cyberspace, he pondered the theory. After a while, he concluded that he was in fact a warrior, who wanted to be a soldier.

X's left leg shook nervously as he looked around to see if he was being watched. After dropping off the mechanical bug at Marlow's, he'd taken the teleporter on his building's rooftop to Central Park. X could walk up to the statue easily enough, but it stood on a pedestal five feet high. He'd never see the top of its head from the ground.

With the recent attacks, every human in New York City would be jumpy at the sight of a mechinoid, be they reploid or otherwise. He even noticed that there were no maintenance bots around as the sun began to climb towards its usual 9 am mark.

He would stick out like a zebra in a family portrait if anyone cared to look his way.

X activated the thrusters in his boots, inching his way upward slowly, still sweeping the area visually for trouble. He had to be wary of anymore traps surrounding Hephaestus's clues. He could ill afford another lengthy repair; time was running out to find the Wily Manor.

When he could finally see the top of the statue horse's head, X saw that a small datapad had been fixed there with a velcro pad. He snatched it up and turned off his thrusters, landing with a clank.

X touched the screen, which sprang to life, showing a simple word message. 'Go to Halif's Meats on 42nd Street. Ask for Georgie. Then ask Georgie for his number. When you have done this, hit the orange 'next' button. Not too early; these messages will permanently delete when you hit 'next'.

X didn't want to be in New York, but it seemed he had no choice.

It had taken an hour to get to the butcher shop by way of avoiding major throngs of people. It was the Big Apple; most folks went unseen all the time, but he was the only reploid around.

Weaving in and out of alleys and side streets, X brushed through an open doorway into Halif's Meats. Behind the counter stood a sweaty, rotund man of middling age, the stains of blood on his white apron stabbing his vision.

"Excuse me, I'm looking for Georgie," X asked hesitantly. The man rammed his cleaver into a cutting board and walked through a rubber curtain, sputtering curses in Polish as he went. A minute later, a man looking similar enough to be the shopkeep's brother emerged, wearing similar garb.

"Yes, whatchou want, robot," the man groused.

"I have been instructed to ask for your number," X said slowly. The human blanched, taking a step back and looking around nervously.

"Nine," said Georgie. "Now go away, no more robots! Georgie never want to see robot in here again!" X left, pulling up the datapad after memorizing the first number.

He hit the next button, and read the second prompt. 'Go to Lightning Comics on 19th Street and find out which issue number of Ogos they will not sell.' X groaned aloud. He didn't have time for this scavenger hunt!

Yet as he ran along the sidewalks towards 19th Street, he realized something. Both clues thus far had been numbers. Hephaestus might be giving him coordinates!

It was nearly four in the afternoon when X got to the fifth direction. 'Now head to Detroit, and find the number marked on the desk of the city's head civil engineer.' X could have screamed.

He had either a latitude or a longitude now, but this game was taking too long. He had just over two days to get all of the remaining numbers, and he would only have access to some of them at limited times, he suspected.

Even using teleporter technology, he couldn't hope to get to a government employee's desk before business hours ended. Using the return device and then the teleporter to go to Detroit would take at least five minutes, at which point he'd have to find out where the head engineer was for Detroit. He didn't know how long that would take, bur even if he got the location quickly, he'd never catch the man in time to see his office or the desk in question.

Unless, of course, he broke in. He would have no legal excuse for such action; by keeping the Hunters' Organization entirely out of the loop, he'd robbed himself of a possibly very useful tool.

What to do? And nothing said that the rest of the numbers would all be in Detroit, either. There might be only one or two. Then what?

X didn't know. He would have to break the law this late afternoon, it seemed, if he wanted to find out.

"He'll never get the rest of the numbers in time," Paladin said evenly. He had managed to completely control his emotions for the last few hours, though terror edged close, a snarling, snapping beast that ranged close to the campfire at which sat his logical mind. The fire burned brightest when in his lord's presence, as he was now, the two mechinoids enjoying more wine.

"He may surprise us yet," Hephaestus replied. He sloshed his wine a little. "You may wonder why we never get drunk, no matter how much of this stuff we ingest."

"The thought had crossed my mind."

"Our brains aren't organic, for one thing," the crimson and white mechinoid said. "Secondly, the way in which our artificial stomachs process bio-organic material is not the same as a human. Our units break every last particle down, transforming everything into storable, usable energy. The only waste we emit is a trace amount of carbons through our back vents."

"Curious, and most efficient, master. One would think the humans could benefit from such technology."

"Oh, indeed they would," said Hephaestus. "They would require a host of other minor enhancements and replacements, but they and the world they live in would be far better off for the change. If done at the peak of adolescence, they would practically save their entire species."

Paladin mused on that for a few minutes, not wanting to spoil his master's good humour. He then cleared his throat (an unnecessary but common enough habit) and leaned forward in his seat, saying, "How many will die if he doesn't arrive in time?"

"My estimates come out to around 348 million people, in the initial blasts," Hephaestus said, not looking at Paladin. "Within six months, an additional 217 million due to radiation sickness and other acute complications."

Silence reigned for several long minutes. "Staggering," Paladin finally whispered.

"Yes. A quarter of the world's total population at present. Make no mistake about it, my friend, I will not launch the missiles unless he's late. But the moment time expires, I let Hell take root. Justice must never be hesitant."

The two sat and drank their wine then, letting their banter turn to the casual and mundane. Yet not once during their talk did Paladin let the beast of terror draw closer to the fire. It lurked instead just beyond, close enough to be heard, but far enough to be unseen.

Chapter 18

Deadline

X had just arrived in downtown Detroit when his private commlink line chirped. "This is X," he said.

"X, it's Marlow. You should get back here to my place now, I've got something to show you."

"Can it wait?"

"No, I think you need to see this now. This is big." With 48 hours until untold destruction would rain down across the planet, X didn't have any time to spare. If he went back to Marlow's now and spent half an hour hearing the detective's findings, he could probably still get back to Detroit and get his next number clue before midnight.

"I'll be there shortly," X rasped. "This had better be important." In a flash of blue light, X disappeared as quickly as he'd come to the Motor City, leaving a nearby street gang member frightened and wondering if all those stories about vengeful angels from the sky his grandmother had gone on about were true.

Orbous's hands flew around to his controls in a wild panic, his wrist and finger pistons, joints and cables heating to high levels. Something had gone terribly wrong, terribly wrong indeed.

He was supposed to be Hephaestus's systems expert, capable of handling all aspects of surveillance and data systems. Yet only twenty minutes ago, half of his fleet of cam-drones had suddenly lost audio, and twelve lost video and control feeds.

Every system analysis he ran fed him the same error reports, none of which made sense. The coding on the tiny machines was obsolete, leaving him flailing about for makeshift solutions, none of which worked.

He would have a full cascade failure if he didn't stop the program errors in the next hour.

Orbous took a moment to roll away from his consoles, closing his optics for a minute. As Crystal Man, he'd been among the most intelligent of all of Wily's Robot Masters, either before or after his deployment. He alone had been able to fight Megaman based on previously reviewed video of the Blue Bomber.

He'd come close to killing Megaman, but Wily's archfoe had proven resilient and too fast for Crystal Man.

Orbous thought about form and function. His own new body had been fashioned on a humanoid-arachnid hybrid. Why? Logically, the web a spider wove could be monitored from any point on said web. The multi-faceted eyes could look in various directions for threats, allowing the spider to respond almost instantly to any situation.

The cam-drones, well, they were fashioned on flying insects, all the same kind, part of a collective hive. Hence, a hive mind. If one suffered an ailment, soon all of them did, unless the ties between them were severed. Spiders sometimes did the same thing to a damaged part of their webs, cutting them away and making new to avoid rot throughout the whole system.

Orbous opened his eyes and rolled back up to the console. Using a bit of old coding he had learned from Caretaker, who seemed to specialize in all things dead or lifeless, he systematically cut away all of the affected drones in the fleet, isolating them into their own cluster. As soon as he finalized this command, the remaining drones returned to normal activity.

"Excellent," he hissed, most pleased with himself. Now he turned his attention to the infected units, reviewing the command lines that had begun showing errors throughout. Seeking a common thread, he scrolled through their geographical data. Nothing synced up there, so he moved on to their components list. All were made of the same materials, but that was expected.

When searching through their transmissions, Orbous came upon a curious thing. The twenty-two total units malfunctioning had begun transmitting along the same wavelength. Shortly thereafter, their individual systems began experiencing base code errors.

Orbous took to the central drone command system and programmed in an exception to avoid using that wavelength to the rest of his fleet of drones. The command was accepted and folded into their collective programming.

"Problem solved," he said, remotely shutting down the infected units. He would have to note which drones were now offline and have them replaced.

Very soon now, the panic would return.

X had no right clue what he was looking at. "It looks like some kind of radar dish," he commented, tapping the semi-circular bit of metal, sending it spinning on its pole.

"It's quite similar, actually," Marlow said. His eyes had the cast of a fanatic who has just deciphered some ancient holy text, making a historic discovery for the religion to which he belonged. In this case, though, the religion was history itself. "It operates on a live transmission feed, just like television or internet webshows."

"So what's so important about this one," X asked, standing straight.

"It's broadcasting on an analog signal, X. UHF 21 to be exact." Marlow walked over to his computer station and waved X to his side, pulling up several archive sites. "Nobody's used analog signals since the early 21st century, and a few countries back then, including the United States, mandated that every broadcaster switch to digital."

"How do you mandate something like that," X asked, incredulous. "That's forcing people to do something they not only might not want to do, but that they don't actually have to."

"Well, however they did it, it worked, because even pirate stations went digital within thirty years. X, nobody uses UHF wavelengths anymore, but this thing was doing just that."

"Okay," X said, feeling a tremble of anticipation. "So what does this mean?"

"It means I can track the signal back to where it's been transmitting to," said Marlow with a wolf's smile. "You don't have to hunt down anymore clues."

X almost hit the ceiling in his jubilant whoop of triumph.

It was all going wrong again, and this time, Orbous knew he wouldn't be able to fix the problem. He would have to tell the master.

The green arachnid mechinoid stood outside of the observation tower's upper platform door, hesitating. What would he say to Hephaestus exactly? How would he defend his inability to stop what had happened? He didn't know, couldn't know. He could only hope for the best.

He turned the doorknob and stepped out into the cooling evening light, spotting the master standing over by the north rail, staring out over the ocean. It was a tremendous view out here, Orbous had to admit. He should have come more often.

"Uh, master," he began, slowly approaching. Hephaestus turned his head slightly to the side, acknowledging Orbous. "There is a problem, sir. With the cam-drones."

"Do tell, Orbous," the bigger bot said, waving him forward. The arachnid bot shuffled up, leaning forward on the rail like his master was, looking out at the churning waters. "Magnificent view, isn't it?"

"It is," Orbus replied. "Sire, the signals have been discovered. Twenty minutes ago. Someone used a tracer, followed the signal here." Orbous kept all of his lines of vision fixed squarely ahead, unwilling to look at Hephaestus's reaction when it came. But from the master, there issued no sound, no sense of movement at all.

When finally he spoke, Hephaestus sounded tired, deflated. "So, he'll be coming ahead of time after all, eh? Well played, X, well played. So, Orbous, what now?"

"Um, sire?"

"I'll tell you what now. Keep the remaining drones running, and stream their feeds into my throne room monitors. Then inform Caretaker and Paladin that X is on his way, that they are to take their places. Then, Orbous, get yourself into position."

Orbous turned to face the master, who had spoken yet not moved even an inch from his spot on the railing. His body seemed to sag in place.

Orbous offered Hephaestus a bow, then headed back into the Manor. Hephaestus dropped open a narrow storage slot on his chest plate, and pulled out the object tucked within. "It looks like it's time to cut away the illusions, old friend. Yes, cut them away," he said, sliding one finger lovingly along the weapon.

X locked the coordinates into his optical memory drive, his core memory, and his backup memory. He would take no chances here; he would beat this deadline Hephaestus had set.

Using the global mapping system in the Hunter HQ's tactical planning command room, X zoned in on the coordinates. He was not surprised to find that the entire one-hundred mile radius around the location appeared fuzzy, a distortion field of some kind. There were several around the globe; if he'd been thinking about it before, he could have simly deployed recon drones of his own to those distortion zones.

Of course, he never would have saved the newly-made cyborgs, then. He also wouldn't have convinced detective Marlow to work with the mechanic X had been using to create a 'sniffer', a gadget that would be able to locate cam-drones using the UHF signals associated with Hephaestus.

The human policeman had been enlivened with the prospect, and X found himself pleased to have offered the clearly over-qualified cop something meaningful to do with the remainder of the vacation time he'd taken. X had secured complete clearance with the Hunter's Organization and Central City's government, allowing Marlow the access to sweep the entire city for more of the spying drones.

As for X himself, there was time enough to arrange a video conference between himself, Zero and Axl, the acting commanders of the Hunters' Organization. The conversation had been recorded, and a copy of the meeting would go out to every station commander within the next twenty-four hours.

Everybody was to report via commlink to Zero or Axl. Commander X would be out of operations for an undisclosed amount of time. Captain Swing Gollit, now promoted to major, would fill in the third command seat until X's return. All contact with X was to be withdrawn until further notice. In the event of major catastrophe, commander Zero would return from Moon Base 2.

It was simple enough, and left no room for questions. There would be no further explanations, and any inquiries into the matter would be quashed. Nobody was to speak to human press or military about the arrangement.

X still had twenty-six hours remaining until Hephaestus's deadline. X would take the next three of those to float through the network, and speak with his predecessor. After all, it might be his last chance to do so.

Chapter 19

In the Name of Wily

It had begun when he was just a boy, a boy named Ronald. A spry young lad, running and jumping and playing without a care in the world. Yes, it had begun simply.

Father had been a tremendous engineer, working for Haslin Robotics. Father designed and maintained soldier and law enforcement bots. Sometimes, he worked on his own bots in the garage.

And Ronald, well, he was fascinated, from the young age of six. He begged father to let him help. Father obliged. Father spent many hours after school teaching Ronald all the math and science he would need to learn to work on robots himself in the future.

Ronald proved to be a genius, capable of absorbing information and grasping ideas faster than just about anyone.

He got put into a special school, one just for kids like him. In just five years, Ronald did all the school it normally took other kids twelve years to do. He was very good at math and science. After taking some tests, he was let into college at Light University. Eleven years old and in college.

In the summer before he went, father and mother decided to take him on a trip, to go to a great big park to celebrate. But they never made it to the park. A drunken truck driver swerved into their lane and hit them head-on.

When Ronald awoke in the hospital four months later, mother and father were dead, and Ronald's left arm was gone. He had a new one, a mechanical one. Ronald liked it, but thought it looked too much like a mechanical arm.

So as soon as Uncle Todd and Aunt Mary came to take him home, to live where he'd lived with his mother and father, Ronald started trying to find out how to make his arm look real. This was how he found out about this new stuff called synthskin. The newest type of bots, called reploids, used it to make themselves look more like humans.

So Uncle Todd used some of the money father had left for Ronald to buy some, and Ronald moulded it to make the new fake arm look real.

Ronald went to college soon after that. In his first year, Ronald learned all about the basics of robotics, and something he'd never heard of, called cybernetics. Intrigued, he took up studying equal amounts of both. By the end of that first year, Ronald used what he learned to create a pair of cybernetic legs for himself, covered in synthskin to make them look real.

He couldn't very well replace his legs himself, though, could he? No, he would need help. So he began quietly and carefully tracking down those who could help him. He found a man named Krell, a man who worked for Light Industries, who had once been an authority in cybernetics.

Uncle Todd never asked what the money was for. He assumed Ronald wanted more robotics equipment.

Ronald arranged for a cover story of staying with friends, all of whom helped, while he went and had the legs changed out.

Over the course of four more years, getting his doctorate in robotics at an advanced pace at the age of 17, Ronald had three more surgeries. He was a cyborg, looking for everything like a normal human being.

And Dr. Krell? All he'd asked in return, after that first surgery, was for Ronald to attend some meetings with him.

Ronald became a member in good standing in the Cult of Wily.

X had arranged his secondary weapons for a third time, and stashed two emergency energy tanks in the holsters in his legs. He was as prepared as he could be.

Hephaestus awaited him in the Wily Manor. The Manors were the stuff of legends, brutal gauntlets that defied simple description. It had been said that if Wily spent half the time on his Robot Masters that he had on the Manors, there would have only been two or three campaigns. He would have ruled the world.

X wasn't so sure of that. Yes, the Manors had been terrible, but Megaman had always triumphed. In the end, Wily had done nothing to defeat him and Dr. Light.

A nagging sensation was holding him back, keeping him in Hunter HQ. He couldn't figure what stayed him, but he couldn't afford to wait and figure it out.

X left his office, perhaps for the last time. The cam-drone hidden in the corner of the room watched him go.

"He's coming," Hephaestus whispered. He clicked on his commlink. "Caretaker, are the chains filled?"

"Yes, master," the ghoul replied. "We are ready for our guest of honor."

"Excellent. Now comes the time of lessons true."

Jasper Marlow offered his most winning smile to Briett, who returned it in kind, as he walked into the Hunter HQ. X was soon to depart, and as soon as he was gone, Marlow would begin sweeping the building with his sniffer. He already knew several of the drone spies were here; his tracking program at home had narrowed down the primary clusters of the devices.

There were at least five of them in the Hunter HQ building in Central City. More of the sniffers were being produced, and they would be sent to the other locales on the list he'd compiled and forwarded to Zero and various law enforcement agencies the world over.

Governments wanted to be the only ones doing the spying.

The whole ordeal already had tech pundits questioning what happened to older technologies that still had a solid use, especially if they could be used in ways to harm the average citizen. Marlow figured it would create a whole new facet to technological warfare, maybe something the media would dub "Fossil War" or "Obsolete Elite", something marketable like that.

But none of this concerned him. He was here to perform a favor for the legendary Maverick Hunter, after which he'd return to his regular duties as a detective of human crimes. It was too bad, really. He was starting to like the new work he'd been doing.

He headed down to the main teleporter room, where X stood near the sending platform, Hoffer at the controls. The technician reploid looked flustered. "Something wrong," Marlow asked.

"It's the system. I keep punching in the coordinates, and the teleporter keeps rejecting them as water-washed and unacceptable for a standard landing." Marlow looked to X, who just shrugged. He had twenty-two hours to deadline, so he could afford to wait an hour or two for the technician to figure out how to get him to Hephaestus's lair.

"X, didn't we see the same kind of thing on the network satellite imagery," Marlow inquired.

"Yeah, we did. There's a lot of dead spots like that."

"Is there any way to filter out the distortion?"

"No," said Hoffer, stepping back from the console to collect himself. "I already tried that. The system wouldn't accept any filter types for these coordinates."

"Can you program a new filter," X asked. Hoffer chuffed disbelief, shaking his head.

"Programming a filter for this system and integrating it would take days, sir. We don't have that kind of time. You said so yourself."

"Is there any way to integrate it to just this room," Marlow asked.

"Again, about a day, day and a half. I'm open to any other suggestions. We could put you beyond the distortion with an aqua transport pack."

"No, that would take too long to get to the Manor, and I'd be trying to find it blind," X said. "Any way to tie in the UHF signal to the transporter system?"

"Negative," Hoffer said. "We do that, we risk having your programming skyjacked by the transmission signal. You'd show up braindead." Marlow and X exchanged a quick glance, both thinking roughly the same thing; Hoffer was getting nervous, and nervous techs made mistakes.

"I say you take a break, Hoffer. I could use another ten or fifteen minutes to prepare for this myself," X said. "Detective, hallway?" Marlow nodded and backed out of the chamber, and a minute later X joined him in the hall. X passed his hand over the smoothed top of his head. "I can't have him jumble this up. One mistake, and I could get dumped into the ocean a hundred miles off mark."

"Why can't the system see through the distortion anyway," Marlow asked. "I'm good with looking for information and low tech stuff, but this is beyond me." X thought about his question for a minute, then snapped his metal fingers.

"Think of it like this," X said. "You tell someone about a weird animal you saw out in the woods one night. You even tell him exactly where you saw it. But you don't realize that you only saw it because you had a flashlight, and it was drawn to that light. Your friend goes out that night, doesn't see the animal. Something is missing, but you don't know what. The teleporter system is like that right now. Something is missing in the equation."

Marlow nodded, appreciating the parallel example. "That's a big something missing all right."

"Tell me about it." X paced for a minute, took a deep breath, exhaled.

"Why do you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Take big breaths like that. You don't need oxygen, you have no lungs."

"No, no lungs, but air storage sacs to help simulate human expressions and soforth. I had them put in after the third Sigma campaign, help make me more approachable to the humans."

A light sparked behind Marlow's eyes. "That's it!"

"What is?"

"Those air sacs weren't there to begin with. Well, neither was this distortion, I'll bet." X stopped pacing, hooked an arm around Marlow, and fairly carried him back into the teleporter room. Hoffer, still staring at the console while punching in data, took a moment to look up at his smiling commander.

"Sir?"

"Pull up the global map for that spot one year ago. Just do it." Hoffer hesitated, clearly confused, but he did as asked. The distortion was still present. "Okay, two years." Hoffer switched the timeline again, and this time, a strange, skull-shaped compound stood out on a massive island on the point of the coordinates. Hoffer yipped with glee.

"Sir, that's brilliant! I can calibrate and configure from here! Go onto the pad, sir!" X patted Marlow on the back, then raced down onto the teleporter pad.

As the system powered up and sent X halfway across the world, a single staff member slipped quietly, unnoticed, from the room.

X had been gone a few minutes before Jasper Marlow headed up to the roof of the Hunter HQ with the sniffer device. He would begin his sweep up top and work his way down. When he turned the device on, the small red radar screen immediately beeped, showing him a drone a few feet to his left.

Marlow spun and drew out a small black gadget from his belt, pressing a yellow button. With a spark and crackle, the camera drone fell over from its perch atop the lip of the roof. "Gotcha," he whispered. No more on the roof, though he had another signal just a few floors down. "Time to do my job."

X materialized on a beach of black sand, the ocean waves roaring behind him, the skull-shaped edifice towering before him. The compound looked enormous, and he wondered momentarily how long he'd be trapped within. "Could be forever," he said to an indifferent wind. "Could be I die here."

A narrow path wound from the beach up through a stretch of craggy black rocks, and this X followed, coming to the peak of the path and halting. Stretched out before him was a flattened field of scrub grass, studded with patches of wild flowers.

It would have been beautiful, if not for the Wily Manor. The front entryway into the complex was a gap in the clamped teeth of the skull, which was flanked by more functional-looking towers. Steadying himself, X withdrew his left hand, making his cannon ready, and began walking again.

When he was within fifty feet of the darkened entryway, a whirring sound and movement in the grass made him twitch, taking a firing stance. A pole was rising up out of the grass, and X saw a tiny holo-projector atop it. He stood upright, cannon held down to his side.

A warble issued from the mounted speaker, and then an image of Hephaestus, seated on a throne in full scale, appeared before him. "Ah, X. You have arrived. I will, as promised, abort the launch sequence, since you beat the deadline I gave you." Hephaestus reached off image for a moment, though X could hear the rattle of a keyboard, followed by the drone of something powering down. "There we are. Now, allow me to welcome you to my home, X. Here, I vow in the name of Dr. Wily, to teach you a much-needed set of lessons. The only real question is whether you'll survive long enough to appreciate what you will learn."

"You have nothing to teach me, Hephaestus," X snarled. "You're the one who'll be doing the learning."

"Ah, that is most presumptuous," Hephaestus countered, waggling a finger at X. "The student must know his place. Now, I could tell you what I'd like you to learn, but I believe in the hands-on approach. It's much livlier."

"I don't suppose I could convince you to just surrender, could I?"

"Heavens no, no. That would be wasted speech. I don't enjoy being wasteful. After all, that's the way of humans, being so casual about the detritus they cast in their wake."

"You're well spoken for a sociopath," X quipped. Hephaestus just laughed and shook his head.

"My dear man, you attempt to vex me, that you might lure me into making a mistake. Ha! Cutting remarks are all well and good, but you may wish to conserve your wits. You'll need them if you hope to reach me."

"I doubt your contraptions will be much of a challenge."

"Oh, you are more wrong than you know." The hologram winked out, but the speaker chimed again. "Proceed, on your way, to oblivion." The pole slid back into the ground, and X passed into the Wily Manor.

Ronald had learned a great deal in his time as a member of the Cult of Wily. One of the things he learned was that Wily didn't hate Megaman; that Wily, in fact, deeply respected the Blue Bomber.

But Dr. Wily felt that Megaman was a traitor to his own kind, especially as Rock became more and more integrated with the suit. Megaman, according to the cult's teachings, was a cyborg, and cyborgs were the ultimate life form. They were the perfect balance of man and machine.

The Robot Masters were as close to perfection as a stand-alone machine could be. They were at the opposite end of humans along the line of bases to begin with. Much of Wily's late stage work in life centered around making organic components work within machines.

Simulated organs were the closest he came to a way of making a robot into a cyborg. Not a perfect solution, Ronald knew, but as close as could be had.

Humans could be augmented with mechanical parts, though they too had limits, by and large. As such, the balance could be reached from either end, human or robot. Wily believed that the right candidates had to be carefully selected.

In the case of robots, those possessed of a spark, this was easier to achieve. They were less prone to injury or ailment in the process and adaptation period. Humans were more tricky, but could be done.

Dr. Wily had, after his seventh campaign, completed three test subjects from both ends, humanizing three robots and mechanizing three humans. However, the six cyborgs all suffered grievous complications, and had to be put down.

He had been working on designing the perfect robotic candidate, Subject Zero, when he died. Ronald had seen Subject Zero once at college, giving a lecture on the duties of the Hunter Organization, trying to recruit human engineers.

Subject Zero, like X, was a traitor to the way of Wily.

Ronald had been working a long time at trying to get closer to Zero and X, to find a way to hurt them that would leave them with no doubts. Yes, they would know they had been betrayed, and the wound would leave them questioning all of their alliances, especially among the humans.

"All hail Dr. Wily," he whispered to himself, watching his prey. "All hail."

There had been a cam-drone on the seventeenth floor of the Hunter HQ, and it had very nearly escaped Marlow by flying through an open window in the office it had been hiding in. The office belonged to major Swing, but the gorilla-like reploid was presently down in the tactical division's offices on the third floor.

Marlow checked his sniffer, seeing that yet another drone was on the next floor down. He realized with a start that based on its tracking signature, it was right in X's office.

Wasting no time, Marlow sprinted to the nearby stairwell and took the steps two at a time. Who knew how much the enemy had overseen and heard there? As one of the commanders of the Hunters, X had tended to almost all of his official duties in that room, spied upon by a foe who was proving far more ingenius than even Sigma.

Marlow got to the office, thrilled to see that the door had been left open. He nipped inside, and held out the sniffer. There, tucked carefully on a floor-level shelf on which sat a Maverick arm, a souvenir from some past battle, he spotted the twitching wings of the drone.

Marlow jabbed the neutralizer out and hit the yellow button. With a pop and hiss, the drone fell dead. Marlow walked slowly over to it, crouched down, and plucked it out.

"Quite the find," said a voice behind him. Marlow turned about, staying knelt, and saw Dr. Veris walking over, his lab coat billowing slightly behind him, arms behind his back.

"Tell me about it." Marlow held the drone up to Veris. "Can you imagine what this thing has heard and seen in this office? I'll have to tell X when he gets back."

"I wouldn't worry about that," said Dr. Veris. He brought his left arm around, and at the last moment, Jasper Marlow saw a patch of synthskin sliding back from his palm, revealing a glowing weapon barrel.

"No," he croaked, just before Dr. Veris, once Ronald Forick before changing his name, fired his burst cannon into Marlow's face.

The entrance snapped shut behind X, throwing the entire entry chamber into darkness. Lights began snapping on above in long tubes of halogen bulbs, and X saw that he was standing in a large blue chamber filled with Hard Hats. The squat robots were all hiding under their helms, made of an unknown material that deflected all energy-based weapons.

X grinned to himself. Yes, he'd been prepared for this sort of thing. While the Hard Hats had always been able to hide from standard energy shots from Megaman and X's cannons, they were quite incapable of stopping electricity flowing up under them. X activated the Spark Gap, and fired it into the floor.

The Hard Hats began squealing and running, coming out of the cover of their helms, after the closest six exploded in a rain of shards and scrap. The Spark Gap flowed through the floor in all directions, and X dodged several shots from fleeing Hard Hats, rolling and jumping over the wreckage of others.

By the time the attack faded, only three Hard Hats remained. X took aim, and the moment each one poked its head out, he shot them, blasting them apart. The room had become a mechanical sepulchre.

Only one set of doors stood at the far end of the room, seventy yards away. X dashed forward, speeding himself up with his thrusters. As he neared them, the doors pulled open, revealing a long, low-ceilinged hallway filled with more robots of varying size and function.

The first one was a kind of giant bee, which X quickly dispatched. Behind it came three more, all easily shot down. A bot in the style of a green-jacketed, one-eyed soldier shot at him from past the bees, landing the attack, which did almost no damage to X.

He returned the favor with a Mega Buster Shot that crashed through ten more similar bots. The hallway was now empty. It stretched on for close to two hundred yards, and at the end, X could just make out a tall red steel door.

He walked carefully around and over the destroyed bots, picking his way forward until he could see that flanking the door on each side was a kind of beam emitter, covering the way forward with beams of orange light. He fired a shot at the left emitter, which bounced away, crashing into the ceiling and dissipating uselessly. Whatever material they were made of was like the Hard Hat helms, immune to energy weapons.

There were doors on each side of the hall, four of which he had passed and two still before him. "Okay, you want to make this an adventure, Hephaestus? Fine." X returned to the first door on the left half of the hall, and grasped the knob. When he opened the door, he could see that the chamber beyond was another plain blue room, like the entrance. No bots in sight, though.

X stepped in and looked skyward. What he saw there made him roll back toward the door, which had already shut behind him. Three heavy, rhino-like machines landed where he'd been standing, snorting and stamping their feet.

The first one charged. X dashed aside, firing blindly back at the rhino-bot. Four shots, five, but still the beast and its cohorts lumbered toward him, turning to keep him in sight.

X fired three more shots, and the front rhino fell with blast holes in its chest and head. It crashed in front of the other three, fouling their approach. X began charging the cannon, and as the three remaining rhino-bots lumbered around their dead companion, he fired on them.

Two were blasted apart by the Mega Buster Shot, but the kinetic shielding around the third one flickered when the tail end of the shot hit. Too much of the shot's energy had been taken away destroying the first two.

X started running toward the end of the chamber opposite where he'd entered. There was a rusty steel lever embedded in the wall there, and he ran for it as the last mechanical rhino chased after him.

X risked a look over his shoulder with ten yards to go, and found the rhino bot right on him. Five yards from the wall he jumped forward, using the thrusters and his overpowered leg pistons to jump off of the wall, vaulting up over the rhino. As he landed, he fired the charged shot, destroying the bot.

X stood upright, cannon charging at his side. He surveyed the large chamber, up and down, and noticed that several of the steel panels in the walls to his left and right were sliding open.

Keeping these in mind, X pulled the lever. The rust of the bar itself was an affectation; whatever mechanism it was attached to allowed it to lever down into position easily. As soon as he heard a loud zapping sound from inside the walls, fist-sized metal darts began firing from both sides of the chamber. The holes in the walls not firing these missiles appeared to be catching the spikes, in turn readying them for further salvos.

He would be made into so much Swiss cheese if he didn't time his return to the central corridor just right. X looked upward, but the answer didn't lay there. The spike holes went all the way up.

The overlap of the rows of spikes would not allow him to dash clear either, even at maximum speed. X considered his options. "Hmm, this isn't good."

On a lark, he shot at one of the salvos of spikes, knocking several of the projectiles to the floor. He waited, and sure enough, when that row of spikes was refired from the opposite wall, there was a small gap. For ten minutes then, X methodically shot down the spikes, then walked from the chamber into the hallway.

One of the beams of energy barring the door had changed to a light green color. X took that as a good sign, then strode across the hall. He noticed, just before opening the door, a small skull insignia above the door, bordered by a phrase.

"In the name of Wily," X read aloud.

Chapter 20

Choices

The agreement had been arrived at without difficulty two years earlier. Dr. Veris would be given access to the hidden underground complex and the capsules in the main lab. In exchange, he would help Hephaestus spy on X and the Hunters. The fact that Hephaestus and he agreed on the theories of robotics and cybernetics had been a joyful bond that brought them together.

Learning that the crimson and white mechinoid was the very same Hephaestus who'd authored the journal so prized by the cult had made Veris willing to do anything asked of him. To be rewarded on top of having the chance to work directly with Hephaestus had nearly sent him into shock.

Veris now worked his way through the labyrinthine alleys that would take him to his apartment in downtown Central City. There, a teleporter programmed to self-destruct after his use waited to send him to the secret compound. He would not likely see Hephaestus again for some time, but that was all right. He would have his work to keep him busy.

Ah, Ronald, you've really done it, he thought. You will now walk in Wily's footsteps, complete the work he began all those years ago! The human and mechanical races will be made perfect, harmonized into a new, single kind! Ah, what wonders shall we see?

He couldn't wait.

X pushed the door open, and it swung wide on a sprawling artificial jungle. Treetops hung so closely together that the ceiling could not be seen at first, though X did spy a hole in the canopy overhead that let him see clear to the chamber's top. The sounds of wildlife filtered through the trees and the foliage, eerily life-like. X knew they weren't real animals, though.

"Mechanical animals," he muttered. "Sounds like a psychedlic rock band." He cautiously stepped further into the room, audio receptors adjusted now for maximum input. As he passed beneath one of the trees, X picked up a slithering movement six yards away on his left, closing fast. He spun and fired, blowing apart a segmented mechanical snake in mid-lunge.

Seven more began streaking at him from all directions. X activated another secondary weapon and fired the cannon skyward. The air shimmered around him, the artificial foliage nearby suddenly rimed with frost.

The seven snake-bots all froze solid in a ring around him as they closed. X stomped on the head of each, crushing them underfoot. Then, he released the Frost Shield and dashed into the thicket.

Monkeys, snakes, fist-sized spiders and bot-eating giant plants all assailed him, perfectly mimicking their organic counterparts in appearance only. By the time he reached the lever at the far end of the jungle room, he'd been hit with three energy shots, had one long gouge in his right arm, and had a puncture wound on his chest.

Total life force loss, only six percent, but it worried X that he'd already been damaged. He would have to be less reckless, more methodical, in his approach to the other rooms. Otherwise, the Wily Manor would destroy him.

"He's slowed down," Hephaestus said to himself, watching on the holo-monitors hovering around his throne. "Wise of you, X. But how will you react when the choice of hesitation is cut away? I wonder." Once again the crimson and white mechinoid withdrew his old weapon, playing a finger over it. "I wonder indeed."

The third chamber had been an ice-themed affair, easily bested with his Flamethrower program. The fourth chamber had been fashioned after an earthen cavern, and his Wind Ripper had done short work there. The fifth and sixth chambers had both been straight-forward combat chambers, both bested without incident.

Slow and steady had won him through without injury. As X stepped out into the hallway once more, he saw that the beams had all turned off, allowing him to continue.

X pushed against the doors, which creaked open to reveal a enormous and ornately decorated exhibit hall in honor of Dr. Wily. Statuary, busts, and replicas of the old Robot Masters stood on pedastals around the room.

"Quaint," X said. He might normally have passed right through for an exit, spotting elevator across from the entrance, but he stopped himself. Here he had a chance to learn about his enemy's obsession, perhaps gain some insight into how Hephaestus thought. That knowledge could be invaluable later on.

X picked his way over to one of the less recognizable showcases, an open-fronted glass box with a stack of papers inside. X reached in after scanning for lasers and tripwires, took out the papers, and read the title on the cover page aloud. "Cybernetics: Our Lost Legacy. A Paper by Dr. Franklin Reginald Wily, Ph.D."

X flipped through the paper, using his advanced central processing unit to speed through the material. Wily had written the paper during his incarceration after the fifth failed campaign to take over the world. In it, he stated that he'd come to realize over the course of years spent fighting Megaman that Rock represented the purest form of sentient life he'd ever known. A human, fused and augmented with technology, superior to humans in ability, and superior to Robot Masters in individuality and free thought. Capable of processing normal food, producing a minimum of waste thanks to an enhanced digestive system designed with maximum energy output in mind. Yet if food was not readily available, Megaman could subsist for far longer than any human being on just charging his core batteries.

The paper called for the renewal of cybernetics research. X thought about the lifeless drones he'd fought, and the six kidnapped youths, all imprisoned and made into what they must surely think of as monsters. Yet Wily would have been proud of their creation.

X set the paper back, his mind spinning. Hephaestus, he thought, is this what you want? If so, then why the attacks? Why the mechinoid servants? What are you playing at? What am I missing here?

X walked slowly to the elevator, the inside of which smelled of decay. There were only two buttons lit out of six available, one marked 'O', the other marked 'C'. X wasn't sure what they meant, had no idea if his choice mattered.

He hit the 'C' button, and the doors slid shut. A moment later, he was descending.

"Caretaker, he is coming to you first," Hephaestus said over the commlink. "Are you ready, my good friend?"

"Yes," rasped the robotic ghoul. "My toys and I await him. We're going to play the greatest game that ever was!"

"You shall, Caretaker. You shall. Have fun with him. You only get to play with him once." Hephaestus felt a sharp pang of regret. Caretaker would surely die if X made his way clear to him. The corrupted, addled mechinoid might wound him, sure, but in a head-on fight, X would destroy him utterly.

Still, sacrifices had to be made in the name of any worthy cause. He once again touched his old weapon. Would X figure it out before confronting him? Would the legendary Maverick Hunter survive Orbous and Paladin? What good teaching him if he died?

Ah, but that would not happen. Hephaestus had every confidence that the new Blue Bomber would destroy Caretaker and Orbous, then drive back Paladin and finally come here to the throne room for a final confrontation. He would be battered and damaged by the time he reached the final hallway.

Hephaestus would offer him the mechanic's bay to be fixed up and ready before their battle, though. He would refuse X entry until the reploid was in top condition. Yes, he would be more of a threat that way, but Hephaestus knew that he could best X in a fight to the death. He hoped, however, that X's will would be dead by then.

The battering of that will would commence shortly.

When the elevator opened, X thought he might have arrived in Hell itself for a moment. Hot, humid air filled the antechamber, rusty metal mesh covering molten metal inches from his feet. Chains and hooks hung down from the ceiling, and human organs had been merrily strewn about the room. The smell alone could gag a horse.

X turned off his olfactory receptors and stepped gingerly out onto the grated floor. It held well enough. The rust was cosmetic, he saw upon crouching down to peer more closely. The molten material, however, was very real, as were the human bits and blood.

Opposite the elevator was an archway with a pair of wooden double doors. Above the arch was an inscription in a gothic scrawl. 'Your Choices Will Teach You What You Refused to Learn Before', it read.

"Fat chance," said X. He carefully walked to the doors, the heat assailing him from below. As he grasped the long, vertical bronze handles, he felt a sense of dread steal over him. X turned to look around the chamber. With a start he realized that the molten material under the grating was dimming. Soon, he would be in darkness.

Facing the doors once again, he pulled them open, revealing beyond a perfectly square chamber, all in red metal tiles. The only thing that caught his eye was another set of doors only ten feet or so away. No lights, no cameras, no speakers or projectors.

He suspected the room beyond this square one would be completely black. X stepped through, and before he even got to the other doors, he felt something pass over him like a chill wind.

He attempted to turn on his thermal vision, but he could not see through the doors or the walls around him. Keeping it on, he pulled the doors open and stepped through. Immediately there were heat signatures, both left and right.

A hum as the doors slammed shut behind him. X turned his standard vision back on as the first of several light tubes overhead blazed on. Moans came from around him, and looking to either side, X became confused and horrified.

A narrow corridor had been constructed on each side of the room. Rising now in those narrow and short corridors were humans, all of them chained to the floor. Several of them, seeing X, called out for help, for mercy, for answers.

Directly across from where he'd entered was a shuttered gate, covered by a translucent orange dome of force. The corridors where the humans were chained were too narrow and they had been built into the walls; in short, X couldn't see where those alleyways terminated.

There came a crackle from hidden speakers, and a hologram appeared in the middle of the chamber of Hephaestus on his throne. "X, you have arrived in the first of Caretaker's Play Rooms."

"What is this," X demanded, the humans silent, staring around him.

"This is where we continue to try and teach you the errors of Dr. Light's ways, the principles he passed on to you. As you can see, these humans have been chained in place. Beyond each row of them is an energy panel which, when activated, will release the barrier barring your way ahead."

X heard someone scream to his left. Looking that way, he saw that the walls to either side of their little lane had inched closer together.

"What did they ever do to you, Hephaestus?"

"They were born," the other mechinoid rasped, lunging up out of his throne. "No more back talk!" The walls inched away, back to their starting position. Hephaestus sat back down. "Now, the energy panels have been tuned to only activate in response to your Mega Buster Shot. Before you object, I see you mean to, yes, that means you will have to choose which set of humans will die by your hands."

Instantly all of the chained humans began screaming, wailing, thrashing in their chains. X looked around at both sides, horrified. "You can't be serious," he breathed.

"Oh, I am quite serious. Of course, there is one other trigger that will bring down the dome."

"What's that?"

"Every thirty seconds that passes once I break our communications, I will move the walls in their zones closer, until they're all crushed to death. And don't try to clamber in their to save them; doing so will trigger the failsafe, and they will all be crushed, along with however much of yourself you shove into their midst. Choose, X. Who lives, and who dies? You cannot save them all."

Hephaestus and his throne then disappeared, and X's screams of outrage joined the chorus of the humans.

"Ah, yes, we all must make choices, X," Hephaestus cooed to the empty throne room. "Which one will you make?"

Logic took over in the face of sheer panic. He could empathize, had no choice, really, but all of their caterwauling wasn't making things any easier. His first thirty seconds passed, and every human shouted as one as the walls of their chutes inched in on them.

X tried to crouch down to get a better look at the humans on either side. Both sides had an even mix of men and women, of varying ages. The only mercy here was the absence of children, though he flashed back to the teddy bear in the street in New York City. Yes, Hephaestus had even seen the young and innocent slaughtered.

This sort of thing should have come as no surprise.

Yet it did, and the fact that he had to choose or let them all die made him want to tear Dr. Wily out of the clutches of time and death so that he could break the old psychotic's neck.

Screaming on the brink of insanity, X dashed towards the left chute, knelt down, and began charging his cannon. The closest two humans, a male and female in their twenties, began weeping, begging for mercy, for salvation, while snot and tears streaked their faces.

"I'm sorry," X choked. "I'm so sorry."

The blast of his Mega Buster Shot tore the air.

"Ah, quicker than I thought," Hephaestus whispered with a grin. "Yes, you will learn quickly this way."

The dome barrier had faded out five minutes ago, yet X sat staring at the bloody, gore-caked path his cannon had torn. The sobs behind him had gone from pleas of help to thanks and shock at having been spared. X could not move; his spark had dived deep.

There wrapped around him only darkness, until he found himself looking up once again at the ragged shape of his own body, lashed and staked to a tree. There was a certain hideousness to him now, a baleful, bestial quality that hadn't been there before.

I murdered them, he thought.

"No you didn't," said a nearby voice. X's spark turned to face Megaman, striding toward him out of the darkness. Shadows seemed to cling from him like vines, and they stretched and creaked as he came to a stop several yards away. "You were given no choice. It was either half or all, and you forced yourself into action to spare at least some human lives."

What do you know, X thought uncharitably. You aren't even the real Megaman! You're a blank spark that thinks like him, but you aren't Rock!

"You're right and wrong. I AM Megaman, but I am not Rock. He was human; he had a soul, not a spark. The two are very similar, but not the same. Souls cannot go from one body to the next like sparks can."

I am corrupt.

"No, you're not. Not yet, anyway. But if you allow yourself to wallow in self-pity, you will become entirely lost, and your spark will rot. Look at Hephaestus. He has had the same spark for over a hundred years, letting himself be twisted by transfers to new bodies, by the adamant adherence to Wily's ways. You aren't like him.

"But he will try to make you think like he does. Do not allow that to happen. You may have awful choices to make here, but know this; those choices are forced on you. They are not your fault. Tyrants throw such traps at people, and blackmail their very hearts, and call them villains, so that they can bend others to their will. Will you be bent, X? Or are you a warrior?"

I am a warrior.

"Are you?"

I am. Warriors sometimes must make sacrifices. I will grieve those lost, but I will do as you say. I will remember that the grief of their loss is forced upon me.

"Good. No go and rip that Manor apart."

"What's this," Hephaestus mused as X climbed to his feet, facing the surviving humans. Their chains had come undone, releasing them into the central space of the hallway. They gathered around the reploid.

He was speaking to them.

"Remember, go straight down the hall," X told the survivors. "There may still be bots in those other rooms, so just ignore them. When I get done here, I will lead you away from this island." With that, the humans fled, leaving X alone before the shuttered gate. He grasped the handle, set low to the floor, and threw the door up along its track.

In the next room, X could see another barrier over a shutter gate, and arranged throughout the room were twenty old military-style green cots. Human forms were laid prone on these, held down by straps, each strap connected by cables running off into the floor.

X stepped into the room, and the gate slammed down behind him. To his immediate right, a section of the floor dropped away, and a surgical tool kit rose up on an elevating section of tile. A wave of blue energy snapped through the room, rocking X back on his heels.

A speaker crackled to life overhead. "That's better," said Hephaestus. "I have deactivated your X-ray and thermal scanners, X, nothing more. For the purposes of this lesson, you will not need them. As you can see, each of these humans is asleep right now, but they will soon be awakened. In order to proceed, a three-piece key must be assembled and set in the keyplate next to the gate leading onward.

"These humans are not worthy of protection, of salvation. All twenty of them are criminals with a violent history. They would all be better off dead. But you do not think so.

"My servant, Caretaker, has surgically inserted the three parts of the key into three different humans here. Your task is not to get the key components yourself, X. Instead, you must choose five humans to free from their constraints, any five. They will, in turn, seek out the components.

"If you try to use the surgical tools yourself, I will use my controls to kill the fifteen you leave strapped down. If you try to make any move on the five you choose, the same will happen."

"This test leaves too much to chance," X said flatly. "The five I choose could well kill everyone trying to find these keys. If a component is inside one of them, they'll fight me and the others to try and save themselves."

"That is the ugly nature of humans," replied Hephaestus. "You're always trying to see the good in them. I will show you that there is none. You will be given a hint as to where the components are, however. You need only take the remote on the tool table to get your hint."

X walked over to the table, spotted the black remote with its two buttons, green and red, and took it up. "What does it do?"

"It electrocutes those strapped down," said Hephaestus. "All of these humans were instructed about this test before I released the gas that left them unconscious. They will know what to do when they are awakened. Will you be able to reason with these criminals? Or will their dark human nature leave you standing in an abbatoire? The choice, and challenge, are yours."

Power surged through the room, and twenty humans began thrashing and screaming. It was short lived, though. Just enough of a jolt to awaken them all, and immediately the shouting began.

X had to select five of these bound humans to release, and doing so would not be easy. With the tirades of threats, accusations, curses and bargains being bellowed around him, X could hardly think.

Megaman had told him not to become like Hephaestus. The mechanical tyrant sought to force a change in X by forcing his hand. He didn't want to become the face of his own enemy.

But the humans here didn't know that, did they? X had become widely known for the impatience and distance with which he dealt with the humans in the last few years. Despite always seeking to defend them, it was public knowledge that he had become less tolerant of them in general.

Everybody knew that, criminal or not.

"Shut up," he shouted over them all, firing his cannon up at the ceiling for dramatic effect. Silence hit like a brick. "Good. Now, I don't have time for any nonsense. Frankly, if you're all criminals, I'm not too keen on the idea of letting you out of here to join the other survivors on the beach. They've already been through enough. So, I could do them and myself a favor and just let you all die," X barked. "Or, you can all cooperate with me. What's it to be?"

Silence and staring eyes full of fear all around him. Good, he thought, good little lambs. "Excellent. Now, I'm going to ask some questions. If you can answer 'yes', say yes and we'll go from there. Understood?" They all answered with a weak chorus of 'yes'. "Good. Does anyone here have surgical experience?"

Two people answered yes, a middle-aged Asian-American man and a younger black woman. "Okay, sir, what was your experience?"

"I was a dentist, so dental surgery." Shit, X thought, and some of the others groaned under their blankets. X wondered about that, too. He could see the main straps, and he could tell that some kind of restraints held their wrists and ankles, but he could only tell because the straps trailed out from under the blankets. Curious.

"And you, miss?"

"I was a surgical nurse," she said. "Trauma too."

"Okay, dentist," X said. "Why did he call you a criminal?"

"I got drunk one night and hit someone with my car," the man muttered, on the verge of tears. "I didn't mean to."

"He's full of shit," one of the other humans shouted, a bald-headed young man with a goatee and a lightning tattoo on his exposed neck. "You can't trust that fucker!"

X did something then that he hadn't even expected to do himself; he pressed the green button on the remote. Everybody jumped as they were electrocuted again, five seconds of intense pain. X hit the other button, and everybody slumped back down, groaning.

"No speaking out of turn," X snapped. "Ten seconds next time. Now, young lady, the nurse." The woman could barely move, but she rolled her head to one side to try and look down past her feet at him. "What about you? What did you do?"

The woman licked her lips, still dazed from the shock. Finally she said, "I killed my husband. He'd been beating the shit out of me every week, and I had enough one day, so I waited for him to come home one night with his shotgun in my lap. I blew that sonofabitch away before he could even blink."

X said nothing, letting the tension hang in the air. Finally, he approached her, knelt by her bed, and began trying to undo her restraints. As he touched them, however, the mechanical buckle-locks unclamped and fell away. He pulled the blanket away, and saw that she'd been fitted with a patient's gown. She sat up slowly, rubbing her wrists.

"Pull up your gown," X said softly.

"What?"

"Incision scar," he whispered. She blinked at him, then nodded her understanding. Her abdomen was smooth, though. "Okay. You're good." X then went over to the dentist, staring at nothing as the Maverick Hunter undid his clasps by merely touching them. He too had no incision scar.

X stood up and returned to stand beside the surgical tray. "Okay. Anyone here an electrician, or work in electronics?" Four 'yes' answers, three men and a woman. As X knelt by a heavyset gentleman and undid his clasps, the man grunted. "You okay," X asked.

"Just uncomfortable." But as the man swung his legs over the side of the cot, X lifted his gown, looking at the incision line on his stomach. The man looked hard into X's eyes. "Aw, shit."

"It's okay," X said. He looked over and nodded to the nurse and dentist, who wheeled the surgical tray over. X stepped away, and the man with the component inside his body glared at the reploid.

"If I die here, I'm going to haunt you, robot." X said nothing, because he would be haunted anyway.

"Smart of you, X," Hephaestus said, listening in. "Perhaps too smart."

The supplies on the surgical cart were adequate to perform this kind of work once or twice, but not three times. X also had limited time. He quickly selected two more humans to free, skipping more questioning. The two men he selected he quickly knocked out with a light punch to the forehead.

While the nurse and dentist flinched, X lifted up the two men's gowns. Sure enough, they had incision scars. X hadn't needed his x-ray or thermal vision. Hephaestus had underestimated the reploid.

A base-level biometric scanner program in his optics told him that these two men had infections in their bloodstreams, likely from a botched surgical procedure. X intuited that the presence of the key components didn't help.

The first man had been given a shot by the dentist to numb him up. After that, the nurse had proceeded to use steady hands and a scalpel to cut open his stomach. Grimacing, she'd reached in and plucked out a small yellow metal object.

X took the object and dipped it in a bowl the dentist had filled with alcohol. The blood came away easily, revealing the first part of the key.

X strode toward the barrier gate and set the component in the slot shaped for it.

Hephaestus didn't know how X could have gotten so lucky, picking the other two key-holding humans out of the group. But this had been a possibility, one he could not avoid. A certain amount of chance had been involved in the second test.

"A good thing that isn't the case for the others," he mused aloud.

Half an hour later, the humans were all getting up from their cots, groaning and rubbing wrists and ankles made raw from the restraints. All three of the men who'd had components in them lay unconscious on their cots; they would likely die.

X didn't enjoy knowing that, but it couldn't be helped. Hephaestus had rigged these chambers to force a certain amount of loss. X had no option but to go along and clear these tests.

Setting the final piece in place, the barrier came down, and X lifted the shutter gate. Like the transition from the first chamber on this level to the second, only this time the panels were done in a frosty blue.

X stepped up to the double doors beyond, and entered the next blacked out chamber.

As the lights snapped on, X saw that the next barrier door was to the left. Before him stood a blast wall with a narrow viewing port. Through the port, X could see a trench in the floor beyond, filled with molten, liquid metal. Suspended above the trench were two wire cages. In the left stood a woman, clutching the bars. In the right, a man doing the same.

Both were dressed in tattered, dirty clothes. X couldn't hear them, but he could tell they were shouting for help. Their cages were suspended from tracks in the ceiling. Past them, X could make out large holes in the walls, which would allow other cages to be rotated out.

He didn't like where this was going one bit. Before him, below the viewing window, were two buttons, one marked 'L' on the left, 'R' on the right. There were speakers set beside these. The speakers crackled, and X could now hear the humans shouting for help.

A set of unseen speakers clicked on overhead. "Hello again, X. Welcome to the next lesson." The humans had fallen silent. "On the other side of the blast wall, those humans before you can now see you on a view monitor. They are looking at you this very moment. For one of them, you will be a savior. For the other, their killer. To choose which will live, you need only press the associated button. You will have two minutes to make your choice, and if you do not, they will both be dropped to their deaths. They will not be able to cling to the bars. The cages are electrified.

"This is Martha and Jacob Stenner," Hephaestus cooed, introducing the humans. "Martha teaches fifth grade, Jacob is a police officer. Both have noble careers, according to society.

"Jacob has beaten his wife at least twice a year for the four years of their marriage, sending her to the emergency room once for a fractured elbow. Not exactly the ideal mate."

"That's a fucking lie,"  
the man screamed, looking around for his accuser. "I never touched her like that!"

"The hell you haven't," she cried out. She looked to the monitor with tears tracking down her face. "He's a goddamn monster! I can't report him because his fucking friends would never arrest him!"

"And Martha," Hephaestus continued, "has cheated on her husband on multiple occasions with multiple men, including Jacob's partner." Silence from the woman as Jacob rammed against the side of his cage facing her.

"I fucking knew it! I knew you were a fucking whore! Koleski? You even fucked that weasely little retard?"

"Neither is very good people, X. Which one will you let live? You have two minutes." X saw a lime green neon counter flicker to life beyond the humans, who had begun screaming at one another heatedly.

X looked at them, weighing his options. He tried firing his cannon at the view window, but the shot had no effect. Like many of the walls and surfaces of this Manor, it was composed of an energy-absorbing material. He tried punching it, but succeeded only in hurting his hand.

He would have to choose. The woman had been a liar and adulterer. The man had been a wife-beater. The choice, for X, was simple. He pressed the left button.

As soon as he did, the bottom of the man's cage swung open, dropping him screaming into the molten trench. With a splash of liquid metal and blooming blood, X saw a single melting leg kick up, the skin and meat sliding off of the bone. Martha shrieked like a banshee, and then the track clicked and began to rotate her out of the room.

To X's expectant horror, two more cages were coming out, each with two occupants.

"What are your values, X? Which lesser evil can you live with?" Hephaestus stroked the weapon in his lap, thinking of how it would feel to see it cut into X.

In the left cage, an elderly couple. In the right cage, a pair of adolescents. All of them stared out, silent, expectant. None dared move. X could make out the tattoos on the young man's bare chest, symbols marking him as a racist thug. The girl, dressed like a ten dollar hooker, had track marks up and down her arms.

Hephaestus came on the speakers again. "Meet your next subjects, X. Mabel and Steven Flint, married fifty-seven years, both retired from working for decades as owners of a quaint little hotel in Ohio. Three children, twelve grandchildren, all of whom enjoy seeing their nana and papa once a month.

"Then you have Jerry Parker and his girlfriend, Liz Ford. White supremecists, both of whom have lied, cheated, stolen, and abused themselves with drugs. Jerry has been arrested for hate crimes seven times, each time escaping justice with the aid of a lawyer hired on by the hate group he belongs to. They are scum.

"This should be an easy choice for you." X looked back and forth at the four humans. The young punks were kneeling at the bars, clutching them until their knuckles whitened. The elderly couple clung to one another, the husband stroking his wife's hair, whispering something in her ear.

X's hand hovered over the left button, but the elderly man called out, stopping him. "Wait, X!" The legendary Maverick Hunter looked up, and felt himself stiffen. The old man had his arms wrapped around his wife, but he was now looking at the young couple, who stared back, unbelieving. "Look at them, X. They're young. They still have a chance to make their lives mean something. Mabel and I, we've had our chance."

"And it was a good run," Mabel choked out between sobs. The old man turned toward the monitor, still holding his wife close.

"Give us one last chance to say goodbye, X. Then, give those two their chance to say hello." X waited as the elderly couple embraced tightly. The younger pair began weeping openly, shaking their heads.

"No, man," the punk croaked. X hit the right button, and the elderly couple plunged silently, wrapped around one another, into the arms of molten death.

X felt like someone had ripped his heart out. Or would have, if he had one.

Hephaestus had one more set of cages to send out, and this time, he felt certain that X's mind would stall out on him. This time, the price of chosing would be too much.

"X, can you hear me," Hephaestus called out over the speakers. "You should be paying very close attention, because now comes the fun part." Two more cages were brought out, and X screamed in outrage at the sight of the humans interred within. In the left cage, two women swollen with child. In the right cage, two more. X dropped to his knees, clutching his head. "You need not know these ones names, X. All you need know is that whichever cage you choose to spare, you will condemn four lives to end. All four of these women are good people by the standards of human society. They are equals here. This is the truth of humanity, X. None of them would be spared in war, and we are at war. Make your choice, X. Save and destroy."

The speakers by the buttons remained muted, though X could feel the desperation being hurled at him from the four imprisoned women. Hephaestus had no right to do this, not to anyone. X could not bring himself to raise his head.

With only twenty-three seconds to spare, he reached out blindly and hit one of the buttons. X then curled up into a ball on the floor as the barrier over the door leading out of the chamber deactivated. He made no move to indicate he even knew he could go forward.

Chapter 21

Final Tests

Hephaestus watched the monitor as X twitched and kicked, his body spasming on the floor. If any attack bots had been able to get at him, the crimson and white mechinoid thought they might do some real damage to the Maverick Hunter before he could muster the will to defend himself.

He considered the next chamber for a moment. If X retained any sense of awareness when he finally picked himself up off of the floor, he would likely recognize the weapons he would be forced to use in the final test before facing Caretaker. If he did, he would know the identity of Hephaestus from the mechinoid's time in his second body.

The time that had helped reshape Hephaestus's spark, made him what he was today.

It would be a staggering revelation for X, one the reploid would carry into his battles against Caretaker, Orbous, Paladin and Hephaestus himself. The mechinoid knew that his old attack patterns had been scrubbed from his combat protocols. Unlike the others, Hephaestus had granted himself and Paladin a tremendous advantage in this regard; they had no combat protocols.

It had been one of the secrets of Megaman's success against the Robot Masters of old. They had all been designed and programmed with standardized responses to armed conflict. Hephaestus and Paladin, however, operated on the principals of human combat, which was to say, they could improvise. Nothing was hard-wired into their routines.

They could fight any way they so chose, just like Megaman and X.

The mad mechinoid mulled this over as he watched X twitch on the floor.

The choice had been nearly impossible to make, but X had decided to let random chance dictate his choice. He had distanced himself from the decision when a minute and a half had remained on the clock.

He'd been genuinely torn, but he'd come to a cold conclusion which steeled his resolve; he was responsible for none of this. The women who had died had done so because of Hephaestus, not X. When madness reigns, only the acceptance of brutal duty remains. Thus he chanted in his own mind.

Curling into the fetal position and trembling was an act. He knew Hephaestus was watching him, analyzing his reactions. He wants to break me? Let him think he's come close. Let him assume I'm rattled.

Because, he thought, I AM rattled. Yes, my conscience is eating at me, but I can at least say that I have saved those who could be saved. The humans who escape this place will be forever scarred. But humans are resiliant, adaptable. They will survive.

Just a couple more minutes...

Paladin strode back and forth in the chamber where he would receive X and do battle. He believed whole-heartedly that X would destroy Caretaker and Orbous, that he would do so with little trouble. And there were two repair stations ahead for the Blue Bomber, one at the end of Orbous's level of the Manor, and one just outside of this very chamber.

Hephaestus intended to face X himself, in the end. But the great Dr. Wily's work, which Hephaestus had picked up and continued, wasn't finished. That was why Paladin had been equipped with the personal teleporter. "Beat him senseless," Hephaestus had ordered, "but do not kill him, and do not let yourself be slain. You will carry on my will, and the will of the great Dr. Wily. There are more great works ahead for you, my friend."

Paladin suspected that Hephaestus would kill X, and then join him wherever it was that he was going, in order to resume his work. With X out of the way, Zero and Axl, along with the rest of the already-wounded Hunters Organization, would be easily crushed.

And then? Peace, and perfection, a world harmonized at last. Yes, Paladin would serve this cause.

He wondered how X was faring.

X finally got up off of the floor and walked woodenly to the door that would take him closer to the end of this floor. He threw the man-sized door open, once again cast into darkness, and waited as the door shut behind him.

The lights snapped on, and X flinched as he saw an energy wall about ten yards in front of him. Slightly to the left and before him stood a kind of strange pedastal with a mounted black box atop it and long handles jutting horizontally from the sides.

To the right stood a human, dressed in a rumpled suit, chained to a similar device. His forehead was coated in a sheen of sweat, a middle-aged man of Persian descent.

Beyond the force wall, in which there was a narrow slit, X saw dozens of poles mounted to sliding tracks in the floor and ceiling. Lashed to these were gagged humans of varying types.

Unseen speakers crackled to life. The chained man didn't even flinch. "Greetings again, X. The people you see before you are the key to this man's survival, and he, in turn, is key to the survival of the Hunters' Organization."

"What?" X took another look at the chained human, and he realized that he vaguely recognized the man, though from where he could not say.

"This man has been instructed to use his mounted weapon to kill more of these bound humans than you in a one minute period, X. If he does that, he may go free. If he does not, then the explosives placed in his weapon will kill him.

"If he bests you, X, I will launch a wave of assault bots under my control at New York City, all of which will be traced back to your organization. If you best him, he will die, as will most of the humans before you. How much death will you deliver to save the Hunters and New York? Or will you let this man kill these helpless people, to save his own life?

"The choice is yours, X. Always yours." There came a loud CLICK from the weapons, and the posts with their human targets began moving around. The chained man began firing without hesitation.

A thin circular saw blade launched like a discus into the air from the mounted box, clipping a man's side. He bled profusely, groaning around his gag and thrashing against his chains, but to no avail. A second saw blade took the top off of a young woman's head, her scalp and part of her brain flopping to the floor below.

X steadied himself, took hold of his own launcher, and aimed. He fired three times, each shot a merciful decapitation. The chained man's aim was unsteady, his nerves frayed beyond control.

X had a flash of inspiration. He pivoted his turret until it faced the chained human, and he fired two more saw blades. The first gouged into the man's hip, causing him to cry out and drop. The second blade clipped the back of his head. Blood and bone spurt out, and rather than watch the man spasm to death, X tilted his turret downward and fired a final blade into his face.

The crunch of bone, the spray and rip of seperating meat, cartiledge and blood, filled X's audio receptors. He let go of his turret's handles, and looked back out onto the killing floor. He'd slain three of those defenseless humans himself, as had the chained man. But X had killed him, giving him one more kill to his count, and ending this senseless test with a minimum of loss of life. The bound humans stopped moving, and the speakers crackled again as the force wall faded away.

Beyond them all, below the timer set high in the wall, was a segmented steel gate, the kind used in the old Robot Master zones. "An interesting way of passing this test, X. You surprise me. It's good to see your logic finally taking hold. Carry on, and face my friend Caretaker, when you are ready."

X made no move toward the gate, though. Instead, he walked over to one of the dead humans hanging from a metal pole. He reached up and plucked out the metal saw blade, turning it this way and that.

Revelation struck. "Metal Man," he whispered. "The Robot Master body Wily put you in, the very first one he made himself, Metal Man." X looked up toward the ceiling, spotted a camera, and approached it, holding up the saw blade. "That's who you were, Hephaestus. You were Metal Man!"

"Bravo, X," the mechinoid once called Metal Man cooed over the speakers. "I congratulate you on your deductive skills! And does it not make sense that I was named Hephaestus, after the blacksmith of the gods? That was my job as a helper bot, X. I fashioned master Wily's robot drones, helped build the first wave of Robot Masters he designed. I worked those metals, X, and earned both titles!"

"Wily is dead, Hephaestus, has been for a long time. Megaman defeated you, and all the Robot Masters that came after."

"Ah, but master Wily always had a helping hand with me beside him. Megaman may have defeated me, but my spark survived. And master Wily's works were not done when he passed, no no. I will see them come to fullest fruition, X! And you will see, before we meet, that you should be helping me do it!"

The speakers cut out, leaving X staring up at the camera, shaking with rage. He screamed, raised his cannon, and blew the camera apart.

"Hmm, temper, temper, my friend," Hephaestus said, playing his finger over the saw blade.

The confined hallway ended in another shutter, but there was an open archway halfway down the corridor, which opened out in an automated repair bay. Hephaestus was either mocking him with such a display, or the former Robot Master viewed this in some deranged way as a means of giving X a fair chance against his minions.

There stood an open repair capsule in the center of the chamber, cables leading away into the walls. He shrugged his shoulders and slipped himself inside. Right away, thin armatures descended from the ceiling to patch him up and administer a feed of life force energy to his main tank.

Most of the damage he'd suffered here had been mental thus far, and perhaps therein lay the mockery. 'Look, I can heal your body, but your spirit shall be fractured'. It had come too close to working out just that way.

Yet X still held to his sanity. There would be scars from being in the Manor, but like all reploids, his scars would be hidden beneath layers of colored transteel.

X stepped up out of the pod when he was fully repaired, and steadied himself. Whatever came next, he would be ready for it.

Caretaker could sense the approach of the bot that his master so hated, the successor of the man who had killed him once. They were going to play a game. Caretaker used the control pad on his left forearm to put his toys into position, a few of them still leaking fluids and struggling against their sobs.

"Now now, there's no need to worry, my lovely toys," Caretaker said melodically, his voice that of a very young boy. "Soon we'll have a new friend to play with, and won't that be fun?"

X could hear someone speaking on the other side of the gate, but the voice was too muffled to make out the words. He felt energy coiling through the air, knew he was in for a fight. "Hopefully it's just straight forward, he said, stepping up to the gate. The floor plate slid down under his foot an inch, and the gate began retracting loudly.

The chamber beyond had been arranged to resemble a graveyard, complete with holographic skies, artificial grass, headstones and uneven ground. Atop a short hill to the left of this benighted scene stood two of the human-machine drones, slowly raising blasters at him.

Except, X saw, this time their eyes shone with life. Terrified, confused life. These weren't drones; they were living cyborgs. The pair fired at him, the energy bullets smacking into the ground a few feet in front of him, churning up artificial soil and grass. X dashed aside and fired a warning shot back at them.

Their reactions were slow, jerky. Even in the night-like chamber, he could see as he squared himself to face them that blood and bile leaked out around imperfectly healed fusions of flesh and metal. These ones had been rushed.

A blaster shot stunned him from behind, tearing at his kinetic shielding and scorching the back plating beneath. X spun to find another pair of cyborgs, a girl with a blaster and metal face like a skull, and a slightly older male in football pads with some kind of energy axe in his hands. The male was charging him, mouth open but no sound escaping.

X charged his cannon and dashed towards the footballer, skidding to a halt and firing only a foot away. The heavyset cyborg was blown back, metal and chunks of bone and organs spewing in an arc. The energy axe fell heavily to the ground.

X wiped blood from his optics as the first two drones fired at him again, closer this time. He jumped over a shot from the girl, twisting as he left the ground to fire back at the first two. They had split a few feet apart, a smart move. Before landing, X fired a single shot, catching one in the chest, throwing him back.

The girl behind him fired two more shots, one hitting him in the back of the leg, the other sailing wide to his left. X snap-rolled backwards, coming up with his cannon thrusting up under the girl's metallic chin.

The impact of the impromptu uppercut broke her neck. She flopped to the ground, arms and legs twitching.

X heard more of them approaching over a rolling hill behind and to his left. Switching to the Rolling Mine, X fired the weapon twice and ran towards the origin point of the chamber. As he made it back to the gate, twin explosions rocked the air behind him.

A bloody, mangled arm landed at his feet, the fingers still twitching, a blaster clutched in death. A frayed cable ran from the charred elbow out to the wrist, where the plastic coating had melted to the skin in the explosion.

"This is my holiday," X quipped to himself. With a liberal moment to collect himself, the Maverick Hunter jetted to the left and forward, rising up over a hillock and coming in view of a column of graves going fifty yards back. At the back of the column stood a bandage-wrapped ghoul of metal, its half-skull visage gleaming in the simulated moonlight. Rangy and corpse-like, the mechinoid glared at X through scarlet optics, a small sickle in each hand.

Flanking the ghoul were six more of the cybernetic soldiers, all of them now taking up stances to be at the ready. Four of them appeared to be ranged fighters, three with blasters and a fourth with two forearm-mounted weapons. The two foremost cyborgs were large, heavyset males, each holding energized battle axes.

The ghoul pointed one hooked blade up at X. "Get him," Caretaker rasped. The two heavies began their charge, moving at incredible speed on artificial legs. X fired the Rolling Mines at them, but the heavies leaped clear at the last moment.

"Fast learners," X said as he ran to the right. Charging his standard cannon weapon, X was thrown back as the wrist-mounted ranged cyborg fired a concussion shell at him. The blast knocked him off of the hillock, reducing his kinetic shielding to eight percent. He would soon start taking damage if his shields weren't given a chance to recover.

X climbed to his feet in time to sidestep one axe swing, only to have the other bite into his right leg. The enegized edge only cut half an inch into his body plating, and he ended the threat with a Mega Buster Shot through the heavy's chest. Diving backward, he fired five rapid shots at the other heavy, who fell back but remained standing.

X ducked a high horizontal swing and kicked out, tripping the second heavy. Another three rapid shots reduced that one's head to a fine paste on the ground. He had no time for mercy or regrets; these cyborgs were out to kill him.

Human ingenuity caused X his next injury. One of the blaster-wielders came charging over the hillock, and X squared himself to shoot the female running at him. His first shot tore through her shoulder, but still she came, screaming like a banshee. A second shot smashed apart her leg, but she only kept hopping at him. X dashed forward to knock her flat for a kill shot, and as he closed, he saw the grenado held in her left hand.

The explosion flung him dozens of yards away. Deafened by the blast and now aching from shards of shrapnel piercing his body, scorched over a quarter of his body plating, X could not recall when last he'd been so battered. True, he'd only lost eighteen percent life force, but his kinetic shielding was down, he had sustained damage to his cannon and the servos in his left shoulder, and now his audio receptors were undergoing emergency auto-adjustment.

X groaned as he got up off the ground. Right away, out of pure programming instinct, he charged the Mega Buster Shot and fired it three times in the direction he'd last seen the cyborgs and their master. The first shot tore a clean path through the artificial turf. The second and third shots, half-charged streaks of yellow power, struck and killed two more of the cyborgs by their controller.

One cyborg and the mechinoid remained. X felt his kinetic shielding click back on, but it would only hold up to one projectile shot, at best. He dashed forward and left of the chute he'd created, charging his cannon.

As he came up over the hillock again, X tucked his shoulder down and dashed low, having felt the tremble of approaching footsteps. The result was a diving tackle on the last cyborg, its head wrapped muffled in the grip of his right arm. When he landed, it was with a sickening crunch as the cyborg's neck was pulverized under his weight.

Caretaker's first sickle blade rebounded off of X's kinetic shield, saving his left foot from being cut into or off. They'd both come at him; the bot had been cautious, though, putting the foot soldier in the lead. X fired up at an angle, taking off the end of Caretaker's raised right arm.

Caretaker screamed and lurched back, clutching the damaged appendage. Fluids dripped from the end of the wound, splashing the ground and discarded weapon. X regained his footing, firing two more standard shots, each absorbed by a translucent gray kinetic shield.

Caretaker roared, thrusting one long leg out, kicking X in the face. The lanky bot engaged its own dash thrusters on impact, blowing X back several yards. His shields hadn't recovered; the right side of his face ached from the impact and burn, and the right optics were down thirty-percent functionality.

X switched over to another his Needler secondary weapon, backing away and firing two of the energy pods skyward. Caretaker in turn opened a hatch on his left leg, and was drawing out a blaster of his own when the needles began raining down. The mechinoid howled in agony as his remaining kinetic shields came down and his body was pierced by dozens of the thin projectiles.

Pressing his advantage, X charged his Mega Buster Shot, and as Caretaker rose to take aim after the deluge of needles ended, the legendary Maverick Hunter unleashed the weapon. It streaked out, catching Caretaker full on the torso.

The smoke and fire from the impact dragged on for half a minute before X lowered his cannon. Twenty yards from where he'd been standing lay Caretaker, his head, arms and legs barely connected to narrow bands of twisted, scorched and broken metal and wiring. His head was turned to the left as X stalked up, looming over the ghoulish bot. As Caretaker rolled his head to look up at him, X could see the post mount of Caretaker's artificial spine rolling in its socket port.

"Huh," Caretaker wheezed. "You're good at playing war. I, I don't think, we'll, get to play, any other, games, X." X cringed back half a step. The voice coming from the ruined bot was that of a child. "Too bad. I like games."

Caretaker's head rolled back to the left, and the lights of his optics faded.

Chapter 22

Watchful

Orbous watched on his own monitors the last flicker of life flow out of Caretaker. Now only he and Paladin remained standing. It made a certain sense, when he thought about it. The ghoul-like bot had served his function in the master's plans, so he was now done. Orbous himself would be next.

Of course, the arachnid-headed green mechinoid didn't have the benefit of cyborg warriors at his side. When X showed up, the former Crystal Man would be entirely on his own. Not that he couldn't handle it.

All of them had watched X's VR training sessions. All of them knew what he was capable of. But only Orbous specialized in analysis, among them all. Only he could effectively use the knowledge they'd gleaned to its utmost. Thrash had been the only one to come close to understanding what that meant, and his impatience and ego had gotten him killed.

Poseidon wouldn't have even stood as long as Caretaker, had he not been murdered by Thrash, and that was a fact. Orbous calculated that X would not have even reached Caretaker if Thrash and Poseidon had been around for X's arrival.

But he could be wrong. After all, he'd already seen some unexpected maneuvers from the reploid, and adapting his defensive responses accordingly would be a challenge. Still, he had the whole level to wait yet.

X was making use of the maintenance chamber again before going through the exit gate in Caretaker's showdown chamber, a smart move on X's part. Orbous's level of the compound was filled to the brim with combat bots of all kinds, as well as floor traps, sensor-based traps, system disruptors and hologram projectors.

And X had no choice but to face them next. The elevators he had access to now would only carry him to Orbous's level.

Orbous watched the monitors, pincers clacking in anticipation.

This is a war, X thought, a war I do not want. But I will fight, because I must. It's what I was designed for, to fight, to protect the human race, and my own. I did not seek this war.

As gruff as he'd been with humans in general over the last few years, X had never hated them, not as a species. He hated Mavericks, yes, but they weren't a species either. And whatever Hephaestus and his kin called themselves, they were essentially robots that weren't quite standard bots and not quite reploids either. They weren't cyborgs, for that matter.

But oh, he'd come to hate them, too, just as much as the Mavericks. Hephaestus was cruel, twisted, and as mad as a hatter. Perhaps that was the unifying factor, he thought. Wily? Madman. Sigma? Madman. Hephaestus? Paint him with buckets of philosophy and he would still be nothing more than a madman.

So, X thought as the repairs were completed, it's madmen I find myself hateful of in the end. All of the ones who don't question the orders of madmen are just as bad themselves. X took a minute to test his internal systems, clearing out a couple of extraneous bugs he detected in his software, likely tacked on by the foreign system for record-keeping purposes.

He didn't want anything in his programming that belonged to Hephaestus.

X returned to the faux cemetary, which was now lit like daytime. "Not really all that funny," he muttered, stalking past the cyborg corpses. Caretaker, he noticed, looked a lot smaller under the brighter lights, frailer somehow. That one, he thought, that one was truly insane.

The exit gate ratcheted open when he stepped on a pressure plate a few feet in front of it. Beyond was a large freight elevator platform, a control box on the right side. X stepped over to it, and saw that there were several levels to select, yet all but one had been blacked out; level 'O'.

"So many options," X said, looking up into the shaft above. Yes, he thought, I can see drop ports. This elevator will begin to descend, and bots will drop down to try and attack me by surprise. Well, we'll see about that. X switched his cannon to the Spark Gap, the turned and hit the 'O' button.

The gate shut, shaft lights turned on, and the elevator began its steady descent. X watched the platform's floor, and when he saw half a dozen shadows starting to spread, he fired the Spark Gap downward. No sooner did the giant mechanical spiders hit the platform than they were electrocuted and dropped prone to the surface. X fired another shot at each wall of the shaft, and eight more of the oversized arachnids thumped lifelessly onto the elevator.

A minute later the elevator came to a halt, and another gate rose on a vast chamber of green steel panels and what appeared to be mounds of metal shaped like miniature towers. Robotic ants half his size began clambering out of the holes fronting these, and X set to work attacking them.

Though they came in waves of four or five, it only took X a couple of minutes to destroy them and their deployment turrets. He stalked toward a gap in the floor midway across the room, peering down. The gap went down about fifteen feet, and stretched from one end of the chamber to the other width-wise.

The gap was only about eight feet across. He could easily dash-jump it. X took a few measured steps back, giving himself room to maneuver. He kicked on his dash thrusters, braced his lead foot, and hurled himself forward.

When he was halfway across the gap, the tractor beam in the ceiling locked him in place, then threw him back. He flew several dozen feet, tumbling as he hit the floor. He sprang up, shook his head, and looked to the ceiling in time to see a long, narrow white device fold up and roll back to its position over the gap in the room.

A section of the floor to his left flipped over, revealing small explosive packets. X rolled away, but when he got back up, he saw that they hadn't detonated. They were covered by another bubble of orange energy. He didn't know quite what to make of that.

Behind him, another panel flipped over. X moved toward the gap again, and looked over his shoulder to find that several more floor panels were now covered in explosives.

"Oh, fun," he groused. X prepared to dash jump again, aiming his cannon skyward. This time, as he jumped, he fired up, but his shot was just wide of the tractor beam device.

This time when he landed, he was blasted almost up to the ceiling. He came back down in a trail of smoke with a "Hmmmph!" His kinetic shielding was down entirely, and he'd suffered first-level scorching on most of his back. His life force energy only took a four percent drop, but if he didn't wait for his kinetic shields to recover, another blast could well do significant damage.

X sat up and looked around. One of the deployment turrets he'd destroyed had been on the other side of the gap, and he stared at it now, wondering how those ants had gotten over towards him. "The tractor beam wouldn't target them," he reasoned aloud.

X changed tack, firing one of the Needler shots up over the gap. Sure enough, the tractor beam engaged, tossing the Needler ball back out over another set of explosives. It bounced harmlessly off of the orange shielding, however.

X stood up and walked carefully over to where one of the ant-bots lay in a heap. He kicked it over onto its back and examined it slowly, until his eyes locked onto its legs.

"Bingo," he said, reaching down and snapping off two of the legs. Powerful magnetic plates were screw-mounted onto the ants' legs, allowing them to resist the pull of the tractor beam. X used all of his strength to bend the leg poles to wrap around his feet, and then ventured to the edge of the gap.

He floated one foot out and quickly angled his leg down. He repeated this with the other leg, and felt the pull of the beam on him. But he held in place firmly, walking down into the gap ever so slowly, then across and up the other side. When he cleared the gap, the tractor beam shut down, and the large double doors leading forward swung open.

Before X removed the magnetic plates from his feet, he peered ahead. "Oh, what fun," he groaned.

"Not exactly what I expected you to do, X," Hephaestus said, watching the monitor. "You are far more adaptable than records alone would imply." For the first time since X had arrived, the mechinoid once called Metal Man wondered if perhaps he'd grossly underestimated X.

He wondered if Paladin would escape in time to carry on his work.

The chamber X was now looking at had a single grated walkway, suspended over a trench of molten metal. Swooping through the tunnel-like chamber at oddly spaced intervals were enormous pendulum blades, back and forth, back and forth. And the coup de grace? He could just make out little green laser sensors at ankle-height on either side of those pendulum slots.

This, he decided, would possibly be trouble. But X wasn't racing against a clock. He had the time to figure things out. The heat from the molten material caked everything in a hellish rusty red glow, but he could tell from the swoop of the side of the tunnel that the pool was shallow. Good sign there.

The pendulums weren't encased in any of the orange barrier force, and that was probably also a good thing. X activated a Rolling Mine and fired it out. As it closed on the first walkway gap, it hit the green laser and was pushed by a concentrated burst of thrusters mounted to the grated walkway's underside forward. It was sliced neatly in two.

X tried the Spark Gap, but the laser sensor's rigging absorbed the electricity without any notable problem. X took a few steps toward the sensor, knelt down, and activated the Frost Shield. Within a few moments, the entire section of walkway was covered in ice. X jumped up and down on the walkway, and the sensor rigging fell off into the molten chute below.

"One problem down," he muttered to himself. The pendulum appeared to be fixed to a beam leading up into a wide shaft, too dark to see up into. X couldn't risk a blind shot up there; he had no way of knowing what additional trouble he might get himself into if the pendulum suddenly came down.

But, he thought, I should be able to stop it. He switched to the Spark Gap, and as the blade came by, he fired at it. The electricity ran up the beam, and he heard a satisfying groan from the motor that swung the pendulum.

Over the course of forty minutes he repeated the process six more times, clearing the chamber without incident.

Orbous was on the verge of panic. This was not the sort of methodology he'd come to expect from X's history and the VR sessions. X was a warrior, a brute savage in a high-tech body! Why had he suddenly turned thoughtful and cautious?

If the reploid continued on in this fashion, mindful of his environment, disabling traps and passing them by with minimal harm, then Orbous would be slain in a hurry. He wasn't designed to be a combat specialist. Like Caretaker, Orbous could fight well enough against lesser opponents, but against the more capable Hunters or X, he didn't stand a chance.

There were still several rooms between he and X. Perhaps, he mused, I'll get lucky and he'll make a mistake.

X reacted out of sheer instinct, falling over backwards and firing straight up into the underbelly of the enormous mechanical wasp as it passed overhead. When he'd opened the man-sized door leading on from the pendulum tunnel, he felt a tripwire snap against the door, and the fall and shot came without a thought.

Suspended from a vaulted ceiling in the center of an enormous room modeled on some sort of flowered field, there hung a huge metal wasps' nest, a dozen or so warrior wasps crawling about its cratered surface.

X sat up, cannon arm held out, but he did not otherwise move. The wasps paid him no mind at the moment, making their slow, lazy circuits into and out of the hive. He considered charging a Mega Buster Shot and firing it up to the thin beam holding the nest in place, but something in the air under the nest caught his eye.

Four thin tripwires hung just below the nest, each one leading off to segmented panels in the walls that would drop open if the wires were broken. He attempted to use his x-ray vision filter, but much of the panelling had been altered to resist such efforts.

Not all of it, though. A series of tunnels under the floor of the room snaked about, and X could see dozens of those giant mechanical spiders laying in wait, the kind he'd destroyed on the freight elevator.

So, if the nest came down, the room would flood with the spiders and whatever wasps didn't die in the crash of the nest. If he tried to dash his way through, he would be swarmed from above by wasp bots. There would be no avoiding a fight.

"But it doesn't have to be on their terms," X muttered. He switched his targeting to sniper mode, zooming in on one of the tripwires. He kept it in focus and slowly stepped back onto the last grated walkway in the pendulum tunnel.

When he was barely able to line up his shot, X fired. One of the tripwires snapped, and he heard the barrier panel fall away with a thud. Immediately he launched two Rolling Mines and put up the Frost Shield.

Two explosions rocked the ground seconds later, and ten seconds later the first of the spiders came trammeling through the doorway at him. It froze almost solid within a few feet of him, and X reached out with his hands and grasped its two foremost legs, twisting at the hips and tossing it over the side of the walkway into the molten chute.

It barely twitched as it melted. The next eight suffered the same fate, and none of the wasps made a move to come out and interfere.

Slow but steady, X thought with a grin, preparing to repeat the process.

"Patterns will be the death of me," Orbous groaned, watching on the monitor as X dispatched the last of the spiders. The green mechinoid had no direct control over the combat drones, all of which, being simple machines at their core, behaved within preprogrammed parameters. There was no getting around the fact that a thoughtful X could dispatch most of the drones with no problem.

Orbous watched helplessly as X fired a Mega Buster Shot upward, bringing the hive crashing down. He then crouched in the doorway and held a steady flamethrower stream towards the few surviving wasps, all of which perished before reaching him.

Only three rooms remained until X arrived in the gate corridor.

X walked around the felled nest, giving it a wide berth in case any of the wasps inside were still functional and trying to crawl out. The door to the next chamber was another man-sized portal, and he kicked it open and dashed to the right, weapon at the ready.

Nothing came flying out. Instead, X peeked around the corner to find a small round chamber, a strange sphinx statue dominating the center. On the other side of the statue was another door, this one covered in an energy barrier. The statue stood on a raised pedestal, the front of which was a blank touchscreen.

X stepped into the room, and the door slammed shut behind him. A force barrier went up over it, locking him in. The sphinx's mouth grated up and down as a booming voice rang out. "Behold, I am the sphinx, and this is my challenge, X! Ready yourself to answer my riddles, or suffer the consequences."

"Well, this should be interesting," X mused aloud.

"Prepare for my first riddle! X, I am the beginning of my kind, yet not the first slain. Of great power and strength, yet naught could I do from afar. Who am I?"

X thought about that, cycling through his internal database. He stared up at the sphinx, which bore the mark of Dr. Wily on its chest. X smiled.

"You are Guts Man," X replied.

"Correct! Three more correct answers, and you may move on. Now, are you ready?"

"I am."

"Useless by most means, the ultimate power in the end. The weakness of close range, the oddity of function. What am I?" X blinked rapidly, confounded by the prompt. What was useless but an ultimate power? Not a who, a what. X considered all of the weapons of the Robot Masters, but found that he could think only of most of the shield weapons Megaman had adapted over the years. None was what he'd consider an ultimate power.

"You have thirty seconds," the sphinx intoned. X gripped his head, trying to think. With ten seconds left, he blurted an answer.

"The Top Spin Attack!" It made sense to him. A melee attack, it forced Megaman to get too close to his enemies, yet Wily had overlooked it when designing his final bot of that campaign.

"Correct," the sphinx said. "Two more and you may leave unmolested. Now, the next riddle. Golden treasure within, yet no lock, no lid. Delightful when fresh, dreadful when not. What am I?"

X scoured through his database, but found nothing there of a hint. He tried to connect himself to an external network, but his signal was blocked within the room. He had no guess when the sphinx let out a buzzing sound.

"The answer, X, was an egg." X heard metal sliding against metal. He looked up, and saw a large circular saw blade descend from the ceiling on a transteel armature. The blade began spinning, and the armature rolled along a track toward him.

X began running around the statue, firing back blindly at the armature. Still the blade came, the armature swerving back and forth to evade his shots, until finally the saw bit into his backside, chewing through the kinetic shield and an inch of body plating before disappearing back into the ceiling.

X stopped running, rubbing his wounded ass. "That was unpleasant," he murmured.

"Next question," boomed the sphinx. "I have an eye, but cannot see. A master of style and fashion is me. No clothing worn can ever be, without the presence one barely sees. What am I?"

X cycled through his civilian data and catalogues, combing hundreds of stored literary references in his databank in seconds. Finally, he snapped his fingers. "A needle!"

"Correct," boomed the sphinx. "One more, and you can go forward. Look to the screen." X watched as a series of small numbers showed up on the screen, one through one-hundred. "Prime the pump, and leave out the core when you do it." X shook his head. What sort of oddity was this? "You have one minute."

Nothing like racing the clock, X thought. He might have been more bleak about this challenge, but the riddle held its own clue. Numbers, he thought. Prime numbers! He began tapping the prime numbers on the screen, and when he had them all highlighted, he reached for a button marked 'enter'.

He stopped himself with twenty seconds remaining. "Leave out the core," he muttered. He looked up at the sphinx, a grin slowly spreading across his face. X reached down and removed the highlight on '51', a number often used as a base when assembling basic robot programming cores. It was the number of actions a standard bot could undertake without fine tuning.

X hit the 'enter' key.

"Correct! You may proceed," the sphinx boomed. The barrier around the door leading on dropped away, and X made his way to it, opening it on another tunnel-like chamber. Three hundred yards long, there were several raised platforms suspended by anti-gravity pods floating about. The floor itself only stretched out about fifty yards, falling away to spiked electrodes lining the rest of the floor.

Dangling down from the high ceiling were several yellow and black spider bots, which climbed up their nylon threads and out of sight. X would have to jump from platform to platform, avoiding the spiders and whatever weapons they employed, as well as any other unseen traps along the way.

Just great, he thought. X had faced several rooms like this one over the years fighting Sigma, his Mavericks employing such pitfalls into their controlled zones. But Hephaestus wasn't Sigma, and his henchmen weren't Mavericks. These foes were far more clever than that.

X had rarely been forced to think so much during his battles against Sigma and his legions. He realized with a start that if he'd taken the time then to think things through, he likely could have carved through Sigma's campaigns with little effort.

He supposed he might have to thank the former Metal Man for reminding him that he was a logical, thinking reploid, not a barbarian. X started toward the first platform, which didn't move, but just hung in place. He jumped up on it, cannon charged and ready for any of the spiders to come out.

As he jumped forward to the next stationary platform, a spider came down almost right in front of him. With a yelp X fired, and the explosion drove him back and all the way to the solid floor, tumbling away. He hadn't expected the spider bots to explode like that; most bots didn't. He'd taken a hammering, but his kinetic shields held, reduced to thirty percent capacity.

If he'd fallen into the electrodes, it would be a different story. He would once again have to out-think his adversaries. X considered his thrusters, but he knew they couldn't sustain him in the air long enough to cross the chamber entirely. He wished suddenly that he'd worn a flight pack to the Manor.

The only option he could think of was to try and goad the spiders into coming down at him so he could destroy them from a distance. However, they seemed to be programmed, if the first one was any indication, to only descend from hiding if he got close.

X could always try to speed his way through, avoiding the spiders altogether and trying to outrun/out-jump their attacks. But he doubted he had the speed for that. His Frost Shield wouldn't freeze them over fast enough in mid-air to render them a non-threat either.

X jumped up onto the first stationary platform, then onto the second one. The first moving platform was on its path away from him at the moment, so X took a look toward the ceiling. Two hatches stood an inch or two open, a mechanical spider laying in wait above.

If he jumped forward, they would fall on him quickly. If he tried to fire a Mega Buster Shot at them in mid-leap, the explosion of hitting them might well throw him past the moving platform down to the electrodes.

For all of his speed, durability, combat efficiency and wit, X was at an impasse. He could think of no way to minimize the risk of injury. The design of the chamber may have appeared simple, but simple setups often provided the fewest methods of traversing them.

X jumped forward as the moving platform drew near, firing a charged Mega Buster Shot overhead. The two mechanical spiders exploded only a foot from their hatches, and the force of the blast came down at X in a wave.

He would have been thrown clear to the electrodes below, but X's right hand snapped out in time to catch the edge of the moving platform. Dangling over the side, X looked down eight or nine feet to the electrodes, watching as they hummed with power. He grunted, hauling himself up onto the platform. His kinetic shields held at twenty-five percent.

He could feasably wait on the platform while his shields recovered, but he didn't want to waste time. Three more moving platforms hovered between X and solid floor, and he wanted to be through the chamber quickly.

A thought occurred to him as he was readying himself to make a dashing jump. The electrodes on the floor below him would jolt him if he fell, causing sustained, steady damage. Couldn't they do the same to the spider-bots? X left his cannon uncharged, aimed up at another pair of ceiling hatches as he timed his dash-jump.

In mid-air, as the spiders dropped down at him, X shot at the strands of synthetic webbing holding the bots. The lines disintegrated easily, and as he descended toward the moving platform, the spider-bots flailed their legs, falling to the electrodes below where they thrashed about helplessly.

They stopped functioning in less than three seconds, and neither exploded. X repeated the process two more times, and won his way clear to the end of the chamber. A tall gate opened for him as he pushed a green panel next to it, letting him into the next chamber.

Orbous had been watching X carefully all along, trying to find a weakness, an exploitable soft spot. The Maverick Hunter showed none, though, short of occassional impatience. For Orbous, it was time to face facts; he was going to die in just a short bit.

Chapter 23

Noise and Silence

X watched as three more saw blades poked up out of the narrow lane and buzzed along towards the end of their slots, a few feet ahead of him. The ceiling was low, the walls only three feet apart, and from the doorway he stood in, there were no alternative routes.

He couldn't well avoid all three of the blades when finally moved forward. Cramming himself to one side, he would be struck by at least one of the blades.

X fired a shot at the right-hand blade, which slowed down for a moment before speeding right back up and lurching forward to catch up to the other two spinning disks. X shot it again, this time with a Mega Buster Shot, but the effect was the same.

He leaned against the doorway and considered his brief observations. A quick calculation later, he pushed himself upright and readied his cannon. When the three saw blades trawled back to the opposite end, pausing to reverse direction, X shot the one on the right and stepped forward two paces.

As the blade regained its speed and started to accelerate to match the line of the other two, X shot it again. The pause put a few more feet between the right saw and its partners, and X stepped closer again. One last shot, and he had enough room to comfortably step up and to the left, clear of the third blade's path and with the first two behind him.

X dashed ahead to a 90 degree intersection in the corridor, and found himself looking down another stretch of floor with three moving saw blades. The track was a little shorter this time, though. His margin of error would, as such, be smaller.

Yet the timing trick worked out once more, and this time his turn was to the left. As he came around the corner, X was struck in the head by an energy shot, thrown back and down by the blow. His kinetic shielding held, and he quickly rolled back out of the way of another shot.

He'd caught a glimpse of that third stretch of corridor. Three more floor-crawling blades, and halfway down the track, an energy shot turret aimed in his direction. With his cannon on his left arm, he'd have to expose at least part of himself in order to fire at the turret.

"Damn," he muttered. He charged the cannon, took a deep breath, then quickly dashed out and fired at the turret. The Mega Buster Shot took its target, but X still got hit by an energy projectile. He stumbled back, his shielding gone and four percent life force drained.

The saw blades were easy enough to work around, as he had the first two sets. When X got to the next corner, he quickly darted a look around it.

What he'd seen in that quick peek confused him. The next walkway led a hundred yards down to a narrow gate out of the chamber. There were no blade tracks, no turrets, and no bots barring the way. Something didn't pan out.

X took another quick peek, but he saw the same thing the second time round. He didn't trust it; this level had been laden with and centered around various types of traps. Nothing was as simple as it seemed.

Using the fact that the corridor turned right from him now, X wrapped his cannon arm around the corner and fired a Rolling Mine. He heard it moving along, rolling at an even pace, undeterred.

At the count of twelve, he heard a 'clack' followed by the rushing whoof of flames. The Rolling Mine detonated. X fired another one, this time watching it go. Some fifteen paces in by his stride, the ball weighed down a pressure plate, which activated flamethrowers in the walls, which caused it to explode.

X came around the corner and walked slowly up the final corridor. He stopped a few feet shy of where the Rolling Mine had hit the pressure plate. X looked down, saw that the plate was about three feet long, an easy jump for him.

X landed on the other side of the pressure plating on one foot, swinging the other foot ahead, cutting across a laser sensor's path. "Uh-oh," he managed, just before a long steel 'I' beam swooped down and smashed into his abdomen, sending him crashing back against the head of the corridor.

The ram had chipped away six percent of his life force. With a snarl X returned to the pressure plate and jumped over, holding himself still. He aimed his cannon low at the laser sensor, easily destroying it. As soon as it burst apart, a ceiling-mounted turret swung down, but X had anticipated such a problem. Leaning his head back, he reached up with his right hand and tore the turret right out of its socket, throwing it down the hallway.

The legendary Maverick Hunter followed after the skidding weapon, halting when its weight activated another pressure plate. The righthand wall rammed against the left wall in a five-foot segment, smashing the turret flat.

X activated his thrusters and swiftly hovered past the pressure plate, landing before the gate. He pressed a nearby green button, and the gate slid open, revealing another narrow, empty corridor, one doorway on the left halfway down, and a sensor gate at the end.

He was about to face another of Hephaestus's minions.

Orbous had known X would make it to him relatively intact. The reploid was now a scant one-hundred yards away. Only a sliding gate stood between them now. Orbous had been watching X throughout the level, and his hopes had been reduced to ashes.

He was going to die.

Of all eight of the mechinoids Hephaestus had revived, Orbous had been the least aggressive, but the most intelligent. At least, he thought so. He should have been more valued by the master, kept safe from the depredations of direct combat. Why had he not been given an escape, like Paladin?

Orbous checked his weapon's settings once again, hoping it would at least be over with quickly.

X came out of the maintenance chamber and once again performed a system sweep of his internal programming. Once again there were unfamiliar lines of code present, each one quarantined and then eliminated from his system.

X readied his cannon, approaching the gate with a clear mind. Whatever happened now, he knew he still had at least one more floor to clear before his collision with Hephaestus. Their confrontation would likely be massive, and he did not expect to come away from it unscathed.

X stepped onto a pressure plate before the gate, and it swiftly slid upward into the ceiling. The room revealed beyond was an enormous cube with scores of video monitors on the left and right walls. Standing sixty yards away was a tall, stout green mechinoid with a man-like body and a spider's head, replete with pincers and multi-faceted eyes. The mechinoid had a wrist-mounted blaster, held against the opposing shoulder in a ready stance.

The mechinoid stood silently, its pincers slowly shutting and opening in anticipation. X stepped forth into the room, and the gate slid shut behind him. The monitors on both sides of the room flickered and changed until X saw Hephaestus on his throne, every monitor on each wall used to form a composite.

"Orbous," Hephaestus boomed over the hidden speakers in the ceiling. "You have served me well, my friend. The Hunter before you now has withstood every challenge put before him. Now you stand in his way. Fear not, Orbous. You have seen him fight; use your knowledge now."

X quickly fired a single shot, but the mechinoid, Orbous, dodged aside from the energy pellet with ease. X fired three successive shots, but the semi-arachnid bot ducked the first, jumped the second, and pirhouetted aside from the third.

In Orbous's mind, a cold, steel trap had been sprung. He knew X's patterns, his behaviors. The emotions that had threatened to choke his mind were cleared away, leaving only a predator's logic. He fired his blaster four times in rapid succession, watching X dash aside the first three, the fourth catching him low on the left leg and tripping him up. Orbous's scanners indicated that X's kinetic shields were reduced to seventy percent from the single shot that landed.

Orbous hadn't just been watching X's actions on the monitors, the green mechinoid realized. His scanner and analysis systems had been clocking every internal adjustment the legendary Maverick Hunter made, automatically creating defensive and counter-attack subroutines to use in this combat.

As X switched to the Spark Gap weapon, Orbous's back slid a small panel open, firing a thread of diamond-filament wire to the ceiling. His body rose up several inches as X flooded the floor with electricity, and Orbous fired several more shots.

Two hits, and X was flung back, rolling away from the impact. Orbous's scanners informed him the reploid's kinetic shields were now down. As X started to get up, Orbous launched himself through the air, detaching his web line and firing out another to the left.

As X raised his arm cannon to fire, Orbous yanked himself hard to the side on his fresh line, avoiding the shot by scant inches while his right leg whipped up into X's face. The impact rocked both of them, but Orbous severed his web line and was ready seconds before X.

Leaning forward, Orbous fired a jet of the webbing wire at X's cannon arm, looping around the weapon and hauling toward himself with all of his strength. X fell to the floor with a shout of alarm. Taking advantage of the moment, Orbous fired a connected line of web-wire at the ceiling, effectively locking X's weapon arm in place.

X, meanwhile, was in a state of fury. He had expected a reasonably quick and easy fight, but this bot wasn't giving him any openings. It seemed as though this Orbous fellow kept one or two steps ahead of him at all times. And as X struggled to free his arm from the wire-web, the spider-headed bot shot him four more times, laying X flat.

He was down to eighty percent life force, and his chest and left shoulder plating was now scorched and denting inward.

X tried using the Flamethrower on the wire, but to no avail. Orbous came swooping in for another melee attack, but this time X was ready for him. The Maverick Hunter launched a savage punch to the center of Orbous's face, and X felt something break. Roaring in pain, Orbous flailed back, his left mouth pincer falling off with a clatter.

X then activated the Frost Shield. He felt the web-wire turn brittle as the ice covered it, and with a yank he freed the cannon. Orbous leapt away, displaying superior leg strength in clearing half of the chamber in a single bound. X snarled, firing several rapid shots, all dodged. Orbous wasn't faster than him; he simply knew X's strike patterns, it seemed.

X had a revelation then. Every enemy he'd faced within the Manor thus far had been gunned down. With a wicked grin he deactivated the cannon, bringing his left hand unit back into place as he charged at Orbous.

Orbous began shooting wildly at X, who dashed, rolled and jumped over the shots. When X was in reach, he grabbed Orbous by the weapon arm and hauled hard to the left, lifting Orbous off the floor and hurling him away. The green mechinoid managed to fire a wire line at the ceiling, however, stopping himself from a collision with the wall.

But the line hung too low, and as Orbous refocused his attention on X, the Hunter came dashing upward, delivering a hammering hook punch to Orbous's head. The arachnid bot fell to the floor, dazed and wounded. X packed a lot of power into a single punch.

From his back, Orbous fired up at X, but the reploid had snap-rolled away already. As Orbous got to one knee, X came in from the right, swooping around behind Orbous and latching onto the green mechinoid's wrist. X hauled upward, planting one foot on Orbous's neck and pulling with every ounce of strength he had.

Pain crashed like thunder through Orbous as X ripped the arm with the attached blaster off of his body. Sparks and wires flapped about, Orbous shrieking in horror and agony as X proceeded to beat him over the head with his own arm. Each blow brought a primitive grunt of effort from the reploid, and soon Orbous's neat, orderly thoughts became a hodgepodge of survival panic.

Trying to skitter away, Orbous yelped when X grabbed his left ankle and planted one foot against his ass. With a burst of full-powered thrusters and a Herculean pull, X ripped Orbous's leg off, leaving him limbless on the left side of his body.

What came after that, for Orbous, was a series of dull impacts, and then darkness, as X stomped on his head repeatedly.

"Dear gods," Hephaestus muttered, watching as X committed to the brutality of the last few stomps he delivered to Orbous's crushed head. It seemed X had reached a breaking point. Either that, or he'd realized that ranged combat wasn't a viable solution to Orbous. Perhaps a bit of both, he mused.

Now, only he and Paladin remained.

Chapter 24

Defender of the Realm

X brought himself under control with a concerted effort. He hadn't intended to be quite so primal with his foe, but after tearing Orbous's arm off, every bit of frustration, anger, despair and hatred he had been holding in since arriving at the Manor came flooding out. The lifeless thing on the floor had not been the source of that rage, but X had little room for mercy or regret at this stage.

X staggered toward the elevator at the far end of the chamber. When he stepped onto the platform, it automatically shut and began its descent. X let his mind wander as he was carried slowly down to the next level, where he would resume his battle.

He hoped he would get through the Manor without losing himself.

Paladin felt no tears, but he sobbed aloud at the sight of Orbous lying lifeless on the monitor, smashed apart by X. The green mechinoid had been his closest friend, really his only friend, since reawakening. The master called him friend, but the term held no truth to it in that instance. The lord of the realm had no friends among subordinates; a knight served a master, not a friend.

Changing his body and his name did not divest Paladin of his central essence, his spark, and that spark had been the definition of a knight of the realm. His old body had been fitted perfectly to his essential nature, and that nature had not changed.

"I am Paladin, but I am Knight Man, as well," he rasped, sniffling away snot that didn't exist. He rose from the monitor station in his battle chamber, drawing out his mace and readying his energy catapult shoulder weapon. "I will serve my master."

Soon, he would face down a clearly wrathful Megaman X. He would not waver from his master's commands, but he would also not waver from his own code. A true knight never did.

When the freight elevator slid open, X thrust his charged cannon outward. However, there was nothing to shoot at. The elevator had opened on a sort of grand feasting hall, reminiscent of tales of medieval lore. A long, beautiful oak table dominated the center of the rough stone chamber, ringed by chairs and laden with food.

Well, not real food. Approaching for a closer look, X could see that the plates were all small hologram projectors affixed to the table. Still, the roaring fireplace to the left of the room felt warm enough when he sauntered over to it. He supposed that would help with the atmosphere.

Wary of setting off more traps, X looked at the doors leading out of the room, one directly across from the elevator, one on the left wall and one on the right. He had options, it seemed. Following instinct, X went to the left door and grasped the handle, pulling it open.

The room on the other side of the door was decorated lavishly with tapestries, rich rugs, a pair of fainting couches and a four poster bed. It screamed Victorian, similar to the authentic medieval feast hall but slightly more modern and tasteful.

X saw nothing else of value in the room, and so he backed away. Turning his attention to the other side door of the hall, the Maverick Hunter methodically plodded over, charged cannon still held at the ready. When he pulled open this room, he found himself looking into an armory, weapons racks and armor and shield displays along three of the walls.

A quick analysis told him that this arrangement would make a great deal of sense for the old Robot Master who'd been known as Knight Man. Thinking on that, X wondered at the total count of Hephaestus's felled minions.

"Titan, at Target Field," X mused. "Shinobi, at headquarters. Twim, at the old factory. Then the ghoul, Caretaker, and the spider, Orbous. Now whoever Knight Man's become. What about the other two," he whispered. "There's always eight."

Silence answered him alone. He looked up and around the room, spotting a shield that looked to have a perfect circle in its center. X used a quick optic scan, detecting the camera behind the shield. He offered it a lopsided grin. "There's two missing from these festivities, Hephaestus. Wily always had Megaman fight eight Robot Masters, except for the very first campaign. Hell, even Sigma used eight top-ranking Mavericks during his wars, a perfect emulation. You screwed something up, didn't you?"

But again there came no reply from anywhere. It seemed he wouldn't be getting a rise out of Hephaestus. He had hoped to rope the mechinoid into another conversation, maybe discover some hint of what was coming ahead of him.

X backed out of the doorway and stalked to the doors opposite the freight elevator. He took a moment to collect himself before proceeding, lowering his head, and letting his spark whisper to him.

Hephaestus admired Paladin's courage. There would be no bots assaulting X before his encounter with the former Knight Man. There would be no traps sprung on the reploid either, as per Paladin's request. Instead, X would be contending with a foe who not only knew his style, but who held immense homefield advantage and an arsenal that could rival X's own.

Paladin had been in his level not ten minutes when he contacted his master with the request. He had not been in contact since, though Hephaestus could see on one of his floating holo-monitors the hulking mechinoid standing in the long hallway X stood just outside of, his energy catapult loaded and ready.

Hephaestus watched in high anticipation.

X drew the door open, the authentic wooden creak admirable. Or rather, it would have been, had the opening door not been tailed immediately by a large energy sphere rocketing at his chest. The blow struck, exploding on impact, throwing X unceremoniously up and then down through the feasting table.

The shot had crippled his kinetic shields and brought his life force down to eighty-three percent. A hole had been blasted, an inch in diameter, over his left pectoral area, granting him a look in at his shield generator box. Luckily, the shot hadn't destroyed it.

That's no combat drone, X thought, groaning as he tried to climb up out of the debris. As he gained unsure footing, he looked up, in time to see a menacing knight-like figure looming over him, swinging a tri-pronged mace down at his head. X leaned forward and took the blow on the shoulder, painful but survivable as the shoulder plating dented in.

The enemy bot fairly leaped back away, dashing backwards down the elegantly adorned hallway he'd been standing in, lying in wait. X got up again, more slowly but ready for anything.

"What's your name," X called out, aiming his cannon and charging it at the knight.

"I am Paladin," the other bot replied, its voice a throaty growl. He shifted his feet, electrified mace held behind him at the ready. "And I will hold you here, Megaman X." X fired the charged shot, which dissipated in a flare against a blue translucent energy shield that sprang forth from Paladin's forearm. The larger bot was shoved back, his metal feet digging a groove in the stone floor, but he was otherwise unharmed.

Paladin moved his arm aside and lobbed another catapult shot, which X deftly slid forward under. The shot hit the freight elevator doors and blew them apart in a hellish cacophony of shrieking metal and wires. X fired two rapid standard shots, but Paladin already had his shield in place. The shots were absorbed effortlessly.

X took up an evasive stance as Paladin charged, mace held out to the side as he screamed a war cry. X changed his cannon over to the Rolling Mine and fired it as he leapt aside of the mace's downward swing. The mine struck Paladin on the foot and exploded, but the heavyset warrior barely budged an inch.

I'm in trouble, X thought dimly, switching to the Spark Gap Attack. He fired into the floor as Paladin turned toward him, but the massively armored bot just planted his forearm against the floor and kicked on his shield, which absorbed the electrical current. X felt at a loss as he dashed to the right and into the long hallway.

Paladin gave chase, reaching out with his left hand and palming X's face. With a heave and grunt, he rammed the reploid's head back against a bust of Dr. Wily, smashing it apart. X dropped to the floor, but he managed to kick Paladin's legs out from under him and fire the Spark Gap directly into Paladin's back.

The bigger bot twitched and screamed for a moment or two, but was already getting to his feet when X started scrambling away, firing his cannon's standard shots repeatedly. Paladin managed to bring his shield up after three shots hit home on his chest, gut and right arm.

Paladin then snarled, "You're not the only one with a Buster Cannon here, X!" To X's shock and confusion, Paladin's left hand dropped into his bulky forearm, and the mechinoid shot a block of ice at X's legs. The blow did no damage, but X saw trapping ice immediately go up around his legs and feet to the knees. He was trying to pull free when Paladin rammed into his face with the mace, sending X flying back.

When he hit the floor, three artificial teeth came out of X's mouth. He could feel the synthskin shrinking from the scorching the mace's electrodes caused on the right side of his face. His life force tank had been reduced to sixty-two percent.

X was, in short, getting his ass kicked.

The legendary Maverick Hunter got up onto his hands and knees and activated the Frost Shield, bringing it up just in time to stop another ice-based shot from Paladin. The larger mechinoid brought his left arm back and holstered his mace on his hip, bracing his cannon as he took aim at X, who slogged backwards down the hallway.

X tumbled aside from a pair of shots, vaulting up over a third and returning fire. His shot struck true, spinning Paladin aside from the impact. X then launched a Needler, then began cycling through his systems as Paladin ducked under his energy shield, pinned by the hail of needles.

X came up with a quick combination, having a moment to think. He launched another Needler, then a Rolling Mine while the Needler was still airborne, and finally he fired a rebounding laser beam that ricocheted off of the walls in diagonals toward Paladin.

The optics visor of the helmet-headed bot flashed bright yellow as he tried to crab walk away from the approaching Rolling Mine. As the second Needler took up its barrage, though, Paladin was pushed downward, and the Rolling Mine and bouncing laser struck simultaneously.

There was a scream of pain along with the concussion and blinding flash of the explosion. X stared into the rolling smoke, heard Paladin groaning and moving around. A moment later, a Mega Buster Shot came roaring out of the smoke, catching X on the right shoulder, blowing him backward in a daze of hellish agony, his body spinning in air.

X managed to sit up almost right away, and he saw his ruined right arm lying a few feet away. Past the limb, staggering out of the smoke, came Paladin. His left leg was a wreck, hanging poorly by a pair of cables. A fist-sized hole smoldered in his chest from the laser, and half a dozen needles stuck out of his head. Sparks burst from the shield projector on his forearm.

I'm going to die here, X thought bleakly. I'm going to be killed by a clone of my own weapon. But Paladin wasn't aiming at X. His left arm instead had the hand unit out, and was clutching a small red device.

"X," Paladin rasped, bringing the device up. "If we meet again, I am going to kill you." Without waiting for X to reply, Paladin clicked a button on the device, and he disappeared in a streak of dark energy.

X slumped down to the floor, multiple system alerts clamouring for his attention. He dragged himself to his severed arm, picked it up, and hauled himself, growling, to his feet. The reploid then followed the hallway to its gated end, slipping into Paladin's combat chamber. It had been modeled after a medieval tournament grounds, but X was only dimly aware of this.

He only paid attention to the crimson line painted on the artificial turf that led him to a repair chamber. Once over the threshold and in view of the repair bots standing at the ready, X let his fatigue and pain carry him down, into blissful darkness.

The last thing he saw as he was laid on a table, staring up at the reflective ceiling panels, was himself. His mouth, chin and right cheek were all gone, revealing the jagged metal-covered skull casing beneath.

He tried to laugh, and passed out.

Chapter 25

Our Predecessors, Ourselves

Hephaestus wished for just a moment that Paladin had taken the chance to kill X. His right-hand man might have been fatally wounded in the process, but at least X would no longer be a factor.

Hephaestus had badly underestimated Paladin's combat prowess before X's arrival on the island. Knowing now that he could have been rid of X and carried on Wily's work himself, the crimson-and-white mechinoid shook his head and grumbled.

No time for that now, though. He readied his weapons and defensive systems, and gripped his round saw blade. A flick of his left hand dismissed the hovering holo-monitors, and the whir of the elevator system drummed from beyond the throne room.

There had been another repair station chamber accessible as X dragged himself and his arm off of the elevator from the rear of Paladin's chamber. It was a small bay, attached to a large display chamber, in which stood various models of completed cyborgs.

The repairs had been excruciating. The final station hadn't even attempted to put him into a standby mode, pulling and cutting and reinserting and soldering without pause. His right arm was snapped back into its anchor mounts without the slightest pause once new mounts were riveted into place.

It was akin to complete body reconstruction surgery on a human without the benefit of any anasthetic.

After sitting on the only chair in the room for half an hour to recover from the pain and discomfort of the repairs, X headed into the display room. Most of the scale model units shown were crude, basic things, all tending towards a combative nature. But the model near the blast door standing opposite the elevator entryway was different.

A tall, blone male with a brush cut, this last cyborg appeared to be wearing some kind of purple bodysuit, a bulky thing with silver lines along the arms and legs. An index card sat next to it, like all of the others, proclaiming it the 'Powerhouse Combat Set'. Unlike all the others, whose designers were listed as Dr. Wily, this one said 'Hephaestus' next to the prompt 'Designed By'.

It was dated a month earlier. "Busy boy," X commented, grasping the handle of the blast door and spinning the wheel. Inside stood a throne room as the door swung inward, and up on raised platform, on his throne of fused bones, resided Hephestus himself.

X's first thought when he entered was, He's even larger here than in the holograms. Looking like a cross of Metal Man's original design and Zero, the crimson and white mechinoid rose regally from his seat, which sank on a hidden lift into the floor.

"X," Hephaestus intoned, saw blade held up to his left shoulder, ready to be thrown.

"Hephaestus. I have questions."

"I thought you might," said the mechinoid, lowering its weapon slowly. "Please, proceed."

"I just saw your latest," X said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. "If you have a working design, why aren't you making them?"

"Ah, yes, the Powerhouse. Well, I can't build any of the superior designs yet. My production facilities didn't have the necessary energy to get the job done. The engines at the plant require nuclear energy."

"We would have detected unknown nuclear activity," X interrupted.

"If we were enriching our own material, yes, you would have. That's why I needed to steal those warheads."

"Wait, what? Then, the missile threat?"

"A ruse, largely. Oh, I would have launched a few, to show you I was serious, but by now all of those warheads have been transferred to the production plant for use as fuel cells to power the systems." X shook his head, incredulous.

"Wait, then why draw me here?"

"Hopefully to recruit you to my cause, to make you see that the perfect balance of man and machine, the true cyborg, is mankind's future. To help you see that they cannot evolve any further without the help of Dr. Wily's vision, the harmony of combining soul and spark! And failing that, to keep you out of the way," Hephaestus said, the furor and passion draining from his voicen. "With Zero on the moon and you occupied here, the first Powerhouse units should be completed well before anyone even notices a problem."

"The other Hunters will find your plant and level it," X snarled.

"Not with Paladin defending it," Hephaestus countered with a sneer in his tone. "You know firsthand how potent he is. Your Hunters don't stand a chance."

X began charging his cannon, slowly taking a combat-ready stance. "Mankind isn't ready to take up Wily's way. There's no reason to try to force them into it."

"We must," Hephaestus roared, bringing the saw blade up. "The ignorant masses who refuse the change are not worthy of knowing the bliss of Wily's perfection! If they resist, they deserve to perish!"

Blast and blade flew, missing one another by scant inches. The Mega Buster Shot was easily absorbed by Hephaestus's own powerful kinetic shields, while his whirring saw blade cut through X's and tore a shallow gash in his left side.

X dashed backwards as Hephaestus followed up with a downward strike from an energy blade of emerald force. A copy of the Z-Saber in all but color, the weapon cut easily into the floor, tearing up a large chunk of the floor as he removed the blade, holding it out to his side.

X fired three rapid shots, each deflected by the green saber. Walking backwards, he continued firing on the larger bot, a single shot for each step he took. Hephaestus stood in place, keeping the flat of the energy blade facing X, twitching it only slightly to either side to absorb all of X's shots.

On the fifth such shot, Hephaestus switched his grip and batted the energy bullet back at X, who successfully dashed aside from the reflected shot. However, as he dashed, so too did the larger mechinoid, and Hephaestus brought his saber around in a savage cross-body slash.

The edge of the saber caught X along the right side of his chest, cutting a quarter of an inch deep. His audio receptors on the right flared up from the blade's energy signature, further rocking his stumbling steps. Hephaestus wheeled around and stabbed out, but X shifted all of his kinetic shielding to his right arm and used it to clash against the saber, batting it aside.

Hephaestus step-kicked out at X, but the smaller reploid ducked down and pushed inward, shoving his cannon into the other bot's gut and firing four rapid shots. Hephaestus was blown back, his shields hammered aside and the last two shots hitting him clean.

His armor was scorched, but still intact. X jumped back, launching a Needler before landing. He turned to run as Hephaestus shrieked in a mix of rage and pain. X risked a look back over his shoulder, a grin starting to curl his lip.

The grin died when he saw the other bot chasing after, still roaring as sliver-like needles pelted him from above. No pain would impede him. As X turned in mid-stride, shooting a Spark Gap, Hephaestus hurled himself through the air, activating his boot thrusters as his fists aimed out at X.

The result was Hephaestus landing a twisting downward punch to X's forehead that cracked part of his helmet off and threw him back a dozen yards to the floor. X groaned as he sat up, Hephestus already recovering and opening a panel on his own left shoulder. A snub-nosed missile popped out, launching at X as the reploid made to gain his feet.

X fired out of instinct. Had he been thinking more clearly, he would have just run or rolled aside. The missile exploded on impact with his energy bullet, heat, flames and shrapnel sleeting out at him. His kinetic shields, already low, were wiped out and dozens of small gouges, scrapes and scorch marks peppered his transteel armor. Only a few holes went through to his interior, and the heat from the blast was playing hell with his mobility boards, but X managed to get up and stumble out of the smoke in time to avoid another attack by Hephaestus, another missile launched where he'd been lying on the floor.

X charged his cannon and fired blindly into the black cloud. A crashing sound accompanied a shout from Hephaestus, and through the clearing smoke, X could see he'd landed a blind-siding shot. Plates of metal armor flew as the other bot rolled away, his saber lying inactive where he'd been shot.

X dash-leapt to the weapon, and no sooner scooped it up then a knee rocketed at his face. The blow sent him skyward, and as he fell, still clutching the saber in his right hand, another kick in the side hurled him away.

His mobility drive had been crushed by the second kick. The entire right side of his torso from armpit to hip had been completely smashed in. X felt his systems crying out; 'not again', they seemed to say. He groaned, trying to stand, and that was when Hephaestus came up behind him and lifted him around the waist with his huge, powerful arms.

Hephaestus was squeezing with all of his might, and X howled, thrashing in agony from his already mauled right side. "I will KILL you," Hephaestus was shrieking, applying still more pressure on the legendary Maverick Hunter's battered body. "For the glory of Wily, I will kill you!"

X's eyes locked then onto the saber for a moment. In that briefest space of time, he recalled a conversation he'd had once with Zero. The blade-wielding warrior, who he called brother, had been telling him about an ancient ritual tied to the weapon his own saber was based upon, the wakizashi. In feudal Japan, Zero said, samurai who had been dishonored would stab themselves in the gut with this blade, killing themselves, but regaining their honor by doing so.

So X did just that, thumbing the button on the saber, using the adjustable beam selector (like the one on Zero's weapon) and committing the initial stab of hari-kiri. The blade carved a vicious path through his body, barely missing vital boards and wires and servos.

Hephaestus, whose face was pressed right against X's back in the lethal bearhug, wasn't so lucky. The blade, which X had narrowed to the size of a normal sword, plunged easily into Hephaestus's rounded face plate, tearing through the armoring, the optics, and ripping through his central processing unit. The blade punched out the back of his own helmet-like head by an inch. As X deactivated the weapon, he fell with a grunt from Hephaestus's limp arms.

X staggered up to his feet, holding his gut. He turned toward Hephaestus, who spasmed as he dropped to his knees. The compartment on his own belly dropped open, spilling out five more saw blades. X took one in hand, and as Hephaestus's optics flickered back online for a few moments, looking up at him, X smiled.

"In the name, of Doctor, Light," X said, grabbing the top of Hephaestus's head and swinging the saw blade through his neck. The head cut away clean, clenched in X's left hand as the body dropped to the floor.

X dropped next, not ten seconds later.

Epilogue

X came to a fuzzy form of consciousness just long enough to realize he was being carried. He blinked up at the simian face of Swing Gollit, who offered him a grim smile. He tried to speak, but nothing came out.

"When the big guy back there died, the energy barrier that had been keeping us out dropped. We managed to pick up the human survivors on the beach, though most of them are not exactly the most desirable sorts."

"He, phae, stus," X managed.

"Yeah, we're bringing him along, what's left of him. We'd have Doc Veris examine him, if that were still an option, but it ain't. Doc's a rogue element. Caught him on surveillance in your office wasting that cop friend of yours, Marlow. Veris is a cyborg, turns out. And the leader of the Cult of Wily."

X heard all of this, but nothing else as he slipped into the ether.

Waking up again, but this time X didn't feel any of the pain of his prior awakening. He'd been repaired, and the first face he now saw belonged to Zero. "Hello, brother," the crimson reploid said with a gentle smile. "Glad to see you're back."

X had been in a stand-by state for seven days, it turned out. His entire body had been repaired after thirteen hours of extensive work, including a complete overhaul of his tactile nervous wiring. His motor function boards had been almost entirely pulverized. Rotors and pistons in all of his joints had been battered and bent out of shape. His targeting system had been burnt out, and his life force energy had been reduced to eight percent. He'd only ever been closer to death once before.

Yet despite his full repairs and recovery, his spark had remained away, keeping his systems in a state of standby. X couldn't recall what had happened to him during that time spent as a wandering spirit. He suspected it had been something important, though, something he would have to call back to.

During his comatose state, several strange power signatures had been picked up on global sensor systems, but they had been brief and had disappeared entirely after only three days. X knew what that meant, but the Hunters' systems hadn't been able to pin down a source.

All of the nuclear launch sites had been abandoned after the death of Hephaestus, the warheads unaccounted for. This news put every human government on edge, but nobody did anything rash, thankfully.

X had watched security footage from his own hidden office camera after being briefed by Zero about all of this. Sure enough, there was Dr. Veris, using a cybernetic arm blaster to turn Jasper Marlow's head into so much meat paste. X had forgotten all about the little spy camera he'd installed on his desk. It was shaped like an original Megaman head, a novelty item meant to give the impression that X had a sense of humor.

There was nothing humorous here.

X held a meeting with Zero, Axl, Swing Gollit, and Triclaw the day after he was cleared to return to duty. During that meeting, he told them about Hephaestus's plans, taking special care to warn them about Paladin. When they heard he had a Buster Cannon of his own, all four reploids shook their heads.

There would be trouble ahead.

X dismissed them, though Zero stayed behind. Standing next to one another, the two reploids stared out over the city, each one wondering when the next attack would come.

Each wondered if the Hunters would be ready for all-out war.

And each knew the humans were not.

To be continued...

-Fin-


End file.
